It appears that Paulin, publisher in the Rue de Seine, not being very well off, had associated himself with a man of business named Dubochet, who had before made an enormous fortune with gas. The two represented fifteen thousand to twenty thousand francs, and they ordered a hundred drawings on wood from the young artist. He set to work with precaution, for Dubochet was hard to please, without knowing much about the business, and fined the engravers for the least faults. Gigoux set himself to give his compositions in simple line, without complicated shadows, so as to allow the wood-cutters to preserve a free outline. It was nearly the same thing as the process of the old artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Vostre and Holbein: true engraving in relief. The success of the first sheets was extraordinary; new vignettes were ordered from Gigoux; in place of a hundred they wanted three hundred, then four hundred; then at the end of the work they counted six hundred at least. Money filled the chests of the firm, but when the artist claimed a small share of the benefits, they laughed in his face. Properly speaking, it was the first serious attempt at illustration by the recovered method of engraving in relief, but it was not the only one. Curmer, the publisher of the Rue Richelieu, prepared a Bible in 1835 and several other volumes, among which were the "Paul and Virginia" and the _Chaumière Indienne_ of Bernardin de St. Pierre. He had also collected around him a circle of artists that included Wattier, Devéria, and Meissonier, who was the most perfect and correct of the designers on wood. Meissonier designed very soberly, without effects of light, little scenes admirably cut by an engraver named Lavoignat, a master in the largest sense of the word. Curmer wrote in 1835 in the preface to one of his books, "We hope we have raised a monument to wood engraving. It is easy to judge of the resources presented by this art. We are compelled to have recourse to England to accomplish our work. Peace to willing publishers!" [Illustration: Fig. 96.--Vignette by Daumier for the _Cholera à Paris_.]