The brothers Johannot were the first to join in the fray, under the flag of the poets and others of the romantic school, such as Victor Hugo, De Vigny, Paul Lacroix, George Sand, and Devéria, most ruthless of illustrators. The last-named had designed vignettes on wood, of all others, for Baour-Lormian, that is to say for the foe of the new ideas, at once the interpreter of Ossian and the bourgeois bard, full of fire and fury against everything in turn. The _Légendes, Ballades, et Fabliaux_, illustrated by Devéria in 1829, although a sort of compromise with the lovesick swains of mediæval times, did not escape the shafts of ridicule. In the midst of this movement the Book became democratic; it was printed on sugar-paper for reading-rooms and scullery maids. The generation of romancists diffused its paper-covered works, printing a thousand copies and selling five hundred with great difficulty. Poets publishing five hundred were happy with a sale of two hundred and fifty. Unheard-of titles were then needed to catch the eye, ridiculous and ghastly frontispieces to tickle the fancy of the riffraff. Paul Lacroix called himself the "Bibliophile Jacob," and invented surprising headpieces and foolish designs. And then, as in the fifteenth century, as in the old times, certain signs become popular with the reading public. In the place of the Doctrinals, Complaints, and Disputes, so common in the titles of those epochs, new fancies spring up and have their day. Eccentric devices recommend romantic trash, in which the assassin's dagger, blood, and the horrors of the tomb have replaced the insipid fantasies of the fallen regime. Pétrus Borel, the werewolf, a sort of historic ghoul prowling about the graveyards, enjoyed a monopoly, as it were, of the ghastly titles and contents of this charnel-house literature; it was for his _Champavert_, published in 1833, that Gigoux composed a kind of Bluebeard surrounded by female skeletons, that opened the eyes of publishers to his value as a vignettist. Although he threw himself soul and body into the romantic movement, the young artist did not alone design subjects called "abracadabrants," following the neologism of the time, any more than the booksellers only published romances. An attempt was made, by publishing them in parts, to still further popularise the old writers at all harmonising with the current taste. The publisher Paulin thus issued the _Gil Blas_ of Le Sage, with illustrations in the text by the younger Gigoux, of which the best was hoped. The history of this celebrated enterprise has been written by the artist himself in the curious _Causeries_ published recently by him, fifty years after his work on Gil Blas; and this interesting view of an epoch already far distant gives us in a few words the ordinary economy of these popular impressions in parts. [Illustration: Fig. 95.--Vignette by John Gigoux for _Gil Blas_.]