_Randon_ is as plebeian as Marcellin is aristocratic. His speciality is the stupid recruit who is marched through the streets with his "squad," or the retired tradesman of small means, as Daudet has hit him off in M. Chèbe, the old gentleman seated on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne: "Let the little ones come to me with their nurses." His province includes everything that has nothing to do with _chic_. The whole life of the Parisian people, the horse-fairs, the races at Poissy, and all the more important occurrences by which the appearance of the city has been transformed, may be followed in his drawings. When he travelled he did not go to watering-places, but to the provinces, to Cherbourg and Toulon, or to the manufacturing towns of Belgium and England, where he observed life at the railway stations and the custom-house, at markets and in barracks, at seaports and upon the street. Goods that are being piled together, sacks that are being hoisted, ships being brought to anchor, storehouses, wharfs, and docks--everywhere there is as much life in his sketches as in a busy beehive. Nature is a great manufactory, and man a living machine. The world is like an ant-hill, the dwelling of curious insects furnished with teeth, feelers, indefatigable feet, and marvellous organs proper for digging, sawing, building, and all things possible, but furnished also with an incessant hunger. Soon afterwards there came _Hadol_, who made his début in 1855, with pictures of the fashions; _Stop_, who specially represented the provinces and Italy; _Draner_, who occupied himself with the Parisian ballet and designed charming military uniforms for little dancing girls. _Léonce Petit_ drew peasants and sketched the charms of the country in a simple, familiar fashion--the mortal tedium of little towns, poor villages, and primitive inns, the gossip of village beldames before the house-door, the pompous dignity of village magistrates or of the head of the fire brigade. He is specially noteworthy as a landscape artist. The trees on the straight, monotonous road rise softly and delicately into the air, and the sleepy sameness of tortuous village streets is pregnantly rendered by a few strokes of the pencil. The land is like a great kitchen garden. The fields and the arable ground with their dusty, meagre soil chant a mighty song of hard labour, of the earnest, toilsome existence of the peasant folk. [Illustration: _Journal Amusant._ GRÉVIN. NOS PARISIENNES. "Tiens! ne me parle pas de lui, je ne peux pas le souffrir, même en peinture!" "Cependant, s'il t'offrait de t'epouser?" "Ça, c'est autre chose."]