And Gavarni went further on this road. His glance became sharper and sharper, and the seriousness of meditation subdued his merriment; he came to the study of his age with the relentless knife of a vivisectionist. Fate had taught him the meaning of the struggle for existence. A journal he had founded in the thirties overwhelmed him with debts. In 1835 he sat in the prison of Clichy, and from that time he meditated on the miserable, tattered creatures whom he saw around him, with other eyes. He studied the toiling masses, and roamed about in slums and wine-caves amongst pickpockets and bullies. And what Paris had not yet revealed to him, he learnt in 1849 in London. Even there he was not the first-comer. Géricault, who as early as 1821 dived into the misery of the vast city, and brought out a series of lithographs, showed him the way. Beggars cowering half dead with exhaustion at a baker's door, ragged pipers slouching round deserted quarters of the town, poor crippled women wheeled in barrows by hollow-eyed men past splendid mansions and surrounded by the throng of brilliant equipages--these are some of the scenes which he brought home with him from London. But Gavarni excels him in trenchant incisiveness. "What is to be seen in London gratis," runs the heading of a series of sketches in which he conjures up on paper, in such a terrible manner, the new horrors of this new period: the starvation, the want, and the measureless suffering that hides itself with chattering teeth in the dens of the great city. He went through Whitechapel from end to end, and studied its drunkenness and its vice. How much more forcible are his beggars than those of Callot! The grand series of "Thomas Vireloque" is a dance of death in life; and in it are stated all the problems which have since disturbed our epoch. By this work Gavarni has come down to us as a contemporary, and by it he has become a pioneer. The enigmatical figure of "Thomas Vireloque" starts up in these times, following step by step in the path of his prototype: he is the philosopher of the back streets, the ragged scoundrel with dynamite in his pocket, the incarnation of the _bête humaine_, of human misery and human vice. Here Gavarni stands far above Hogarth and far above Callot. The ideas on social politics of the first half of the century are concentrated in "Thomas Vireloque." [Illustration: _Baschet._ GAVARNI. THOMAS VIRELOQUE.]