However, what had become of engraving by cutting in reverse, the figure in relief, from which printing could be done? It had, we may think, nearly disappeared in the midst of the continued invasion of the burin and etching. It only appeared from time to time in head and tailpieces, remaining purely typographical and lost in other decorations. There were always wood engravers, not very clever, capable only of working simple lines without charm. One of them resolved to resuscitate the art, and made various attempts about the end of the reign of Louis XIV. and beginning of that of Louis XV. He was named John Papillon, and was born at St. Quentin in 1661. His experiments did not go beyond a book of prayers, with thirty-six figures in relief after Sébastien Leclerc. His son, John Baptist, succeeded him, and continued to engrave without ceasing subjects of ornament, letters, often tailpieces, of a good style upon the whole, and taking an excellent place in an elaborate book. Unfortunately, grace had fled; the processes that the practitioners exhibited one after the other were lost; and the Papillons reconstituted, we may say, a vanished art. John Baptist also published in 1766 a theoretical treatise on wood engraving, abounding in historical errors, but in which something to learn may be found if taken with discernment. He says in his preface, "Now that excellent work is done on copper, wood engraving is neglected, and the use lost of designing and cutting the shadows of the pencil on the wood block; most of those who work in it have neither design nor taste, and only follow their own ideas; it is not astonishing that only very mediocre pieces come from their hands, to say nothing stronger; the profound ignorance of nearly all who meddle with it contrives more and more to destroy the beauties of this art in which many people find neither pleasure nor grace. To obviate all this, if it be possible to me, I have undertaken to give my precepts and observations to those who wish to apply themselves to my engraving." It was probably the essays of Papillon that provoked curious experiments on the part of other wood engravers. Duplat, at the beginning of this century, proposed to prepare a relief on stone, and as this would be broken under pressure, he invented a mould; that is to say, he took a leaden matrix from the stone cutting, and ran a resistant metal into this mould, thus obtaining a relief similar to the stone. Renouard, the publisher, made the trials; and the younger Moreau made the designs. Moreau become an essayer of processes in 1811! One of the plates of La Fontaine's _Fables_, published by Renouard in 1812, in two volumes, 12mo, is here reproduced. [Illustration: Fig. 91.--Experiment in engraving in relief by Moreau le Jeune for Renouard's edition of La Fontaine's _Fables_.]