Gavarni's Paris Mornings and Mailbox (1839)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Two incredibly scarce  albums from 1839 by Paul Gavarni, bound together, and with a total of forty-three marvelous hand-colored lithographs, recently came to market. This two-albums-in-one set sold immediately for $7,500.

The albums, Paris le Matin (Paris Morning) and La Boite aux Lettres (Mailbox), are typical - if exceedingly scarce - examples of Gavarni turning his satiric eye on the customs and manners of the French petit bourgeoisie.

Paris le Matin limns the morning activities of  Parisians; La Boite aux Lettres is a charmingly amusing survey of writing, sending, and receiving letters in Paris of the era.

The American Book Prices Current (ABPC) Index, 1923-present, records no copies of Paris le Matin at auction within the last eighty-eight years. Only one copy of La Boite ux Lettres has come to auction within the last thirty-six years but it contained only fourteen thirty-four called-for plates.

Only one copy of Paris le Matin is found in institutional collections worldwide, at the Getty Research Library, but it contains only five of the twelve plates in the series. OCLC records only five copies of La Boite aux Lettres in libraries throughout the world.

This copy of La Boite aux Lettres lacks the last three plates,  XXXI, XXXIII, and XXXIV. 

The institutional copies, however, appear to be incomplete, as well, and it seems that the copy under notice is as complete as has ever been seen within our lifetime and is likely remain so for many years to come.

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GAVARNI, Paul [pseudonym of Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier]. Paris le Matin. Paris: Chez Aubert, 1838-1839.  [bound with] La Boite aux Lettres. Paris: Caboche Gregoire / Chez Aubert, 1839.

First editions. Folio (13 1/8 x 9 5/8 in; 334 x 245 mm). Paris le Matin with twelve, and La Boite aux Lettres with thirty-one (of thirty-four) hand-colored lithographed plates; a total of forty-three plates, most heightened with gum arabic.

Armelhault & Bocher 902-913 (Paris le Matin). Armelhault & Bocher, p. 88 (La Boite aux Lettres, one unnumbered + 348-397).

A Rare Suite of Pre-Political Lithographs by Charles Philipon Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

Plate 9. Action du feu sur les corps gras. Gladiateur champêtre.
Gentillesse enfantine. Symptomes de coliques.
Monter est un; bien, monter est autre. Un troubadour.
(Action of fire on the fat. Gladiator country.
Childlike friendliness. Symptoms of colic.
Fit is, well, up next. A troubadour.).

Before Charles Philipon became France's dominant publisher of (and collaborator on) lithographs by the great caricaturists - Grandville, Monnier, Daumier, Traviés, Gavarni, Pigal, etc. - for his magazines, La Silhouette, La Caricature, and Le Charivari, and was, through La Caricature, the pre-eminent  political satirist of his era, a Republican at war, 1830-1835, with the monarchy of Louis Philippe I, he was a designer and lithographer in his own right.

Plate 8. Le baume d'acier. Mépris philosophique. Jouissances de l'esprit...de vin.
Pauvre pigeon! Quel goujon!
(The balm of steel. Philosophical contempt. Pleasures of the mind ... of wine.
Poor pigeon! What a stud!).

Lithographic art work solely by Philipon (he began in 1824) almost wholly ceases by 1830. Given his later insistent and stinging political commentary through La Caricature, it is somewhat of a surprise that there is not a trace of politics in his early work, which was not at all technically distinguished.

Plate 7. Petit embarras. Cas de concience.  Des gens rassasiés.
Le laid idéal. Fructus belle. Le toutou de ma Grande-mire.
Il achettera.
(A little embarrassment. A case of concience. People filled.
The ugly ideal. Fructus beautiful. The dog of my Great sight.
He will buy.).

Yet "Philipon's fertile imagination partly compensated for his clumsy draughtsmanship, and he found regular employment easily enough as a lithographic artist...The bulk of his production was of a gently erotic nature, anodyne sketches of of the public and private lives of Parisian grisettes" (Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture 1830-1835, p. 8).

Plate 6. Un invalide. Oh! Oh! Le voisin!!! L'age, l'art et la nature.
L'embarras du choix. Le dos, les jambes et le nez aquilins.
Faire la montre, faire le mouchoir.
(An invalid. Oh! Oh! The neighbor! The age, art and nature.
Spoiled for choice. The back, legs and aquiline nose.
Watch the handkerchief).

Beyond tracing the lives and amours of grisettes (French working-class women), he contributed, for instance, at least nine plates to Album pour Rire (Laugh Album), a now scarce series of lithographs printed by Ducarme and sold through chez Ostervald, a Parisian print shop, that softly poke fun at Parisian manners, customs, and the petit bourgeoisie. Though undated, they were, according to the Bibliographie de la France, published in 1828.

Plate 5. Ce qu'on appele piler du poivre. Ces messieurs vont voir la mer.
Physionomies patibulaires. Braconnier Parisien.
(The so-called crush pepper. These gentlemen will see the sea.
 Physionomies gallows. Parisian Poacher.).

Each plate by Philipon contains three to six vignettes of only fair quality of execution. What sets them apart is the idea for each and their humorous captions. These were Philipon's true gifts.

Plate 4. Un martyr de la chasse. Allons! du sang-froid.
Incompatibilité d'humeur. (A martyr of the hunt. Come on! coolness.
Irreconcilable differences.).

What he lacked in artistic talent he made up for as a great idea man with  a facility  for composing witty text to accompany his lithographs that would prove to be valuable assets when he, aware of his limitations but with a keen eye for talent, put aside his career to closely supervise and collaborate with the artists he later hired to provide lithographs for his magazines.

Plate 3. Mon dieu! J'ai retrouvé ma bourse. Un enfant de choeur.
Gestes du mauvaise société. Satisfaction mélée d'impatience.
Il a appres tout seul!
(My god! I found my purse. An altar boy. Actions of bad company.
Satisfaction mixed with impatience. It was only after all!).

The plates for Album pour Rire were issued separately and never collected into and sold as a single volume; there are no records in OCLC/KVK, nor auction records in ABPC.

Plate 2. Chasse au flambeau. Ces Messieurs doivent avoir une bien belle vue!
Petit-a-compte. Observateurs par etat.
(Torch hunt. These gentlemen must have a beautiful view!
A-small-account. State observers.).

Yet these plates were found within an album of others  by chez Osterwald; it was not uncommon at all for a print shop to gather together miscellaneous unsold prints into albums for sale, the albums routinely issued without title pages or any other identifying information beyond that found on the plates themselves. It was simply a practical way to market slow-moving merchandise. Plates by Philipon's friend and later employee, C.J. Traviés, appear in the Album pour Rire series, as well as the anonymously designed Preuve frappante du danger de faibles Tirant with lithography by Georges Frey that I've included below as a contrast to Philipon's middling work.

Plate 1. Une farce. L'amour des Pénates. Nous de payons plus, Monsieur.
Mise décent. Un rosier dans toute sa portée.
(A farce. Love the Penates. We pay more, sir. Last décent.
A rose in all its scope.).

In 1829, a year after Philipon contributed these plates for Ostervald's Album pour Rire, he became the junior partner in La Silhouette. In 1830, constrained by  his partners and wanting total control over all aspects of production, he established La Caricature. Its success forced La Silhouette out of business. 

Unnumbered Plate. (Anonymous). Preuve frappante du danger de faibles Tirant.   
(Striking proof of the danger of a short pull).

Establishing a second magazine, Le Charivari, in the autumn of 1832, Philipon, an artist of little talent but big ideas and strong entrepreneurial spirit, became the most celebrated publisher of lithographic plates of his time. With a stable of gifted lithographic artists that executed his ideas and became the most celebrated group of caricaturists in history, Philipon's efforts raised a low-brow genre to high-brow art.

Detail.

We see here, in Preuve frappante du danger de faibles Tiran, from Album pour Rire, what might, just a few years hence, have been an allegory for Philipon against King Louis-Philippe I and the dangers of promising liberalization and then reneging on it.

Detail.

The king gets a swift kick in the mouth from a gleeful adversary.

Soon, alas, the gleeful adversary is counting the days to his release from prison. Philipon became the most prosecuted publisher of his time.

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PHILIPON, Charles. TRAVIES, C.J., et al. Album pour Rire. Paris: chez Osterwald, n.d. [1828]. Lithography by Ducarme, G. Frey, etc. A series of hand-colored lithographic plates of at least fifteen in number, at least nine of which are signed "Ch. Philipon."

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.

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Booktryst recently took a look at one of the great French anti-censorship lithographs  that was part of the Album pour Rire series, La Chasse aux Lettres, which you're sure to enjoy.

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Deceit, Thy Name Is Woman! Woman, Thy Name Is Delilah!

 

 Hedy Lamarr as Delilah in Sampson and Delilah (1949). 

Booktryst readers on the distaff side who, based upon today's headline, have been called to arms will kindly refrain from launching a pitchfork offensive against your humble reporter. Be assured that fourberies - deceptions - were not exclusive to females in 1840 France, nor at any other time.

It's just that with Fourberies des Femmes, French caricaturist Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier aka Paul Gavarni completed the work of Daumier, whose Les Robert-Macaire (1839-1840) pretty much covered the waterfront regarding the deceptions and follies of men.
 

Daumier's Robert Macaire deceiving a lover by exploiting her love for him.

"When politics became a forbidden topic in Le Charivari, where Caricaturana [Les Robert-Macaire] first appeared, Daumier and [publisher Charles] Philipon turned to social satire. If they could not attack Louis Philippe directly, they could at least show the kind of society that flourished under his gross and venal regime. Taking the flamboyant and florid swindler Macaire from the character that Frédérick Lemaître had created in a hack melodrama called L’Auberge des adrets, they showed him and his inseparable companion, the dejected and meager Bertrand, ranging through all kinds of commercial enterprise, in the stock market, in the banks, in the courts, and in dozens of other public settings, never failing to find eager dupes. Macaire is equally persuasive in the encounters of private life, where no situation finds him at a loss for an appropriate flower of sentiment…" (Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, pp. 234-236).

 

The old pretend-to-be-sleeping routine.

Yet Gavarni's deceptive women were neither venal, criminal frauds, nor full-blown viragoes. With charm and wit, he gently illustrated the psychology of women who deceive themselves as well as their lovers, a foible not exclusive to women.
 

Charles! Charles! Do not ogle me and therefore all women ... it's indecent!
(But of course she enjoys it).

 “In 1837 Gavarni began his connection with Le Charivari, which did not conclude until 1848. In all he drew 1054 lithographs for his journal…Most of these appeared in series, some twenty-five of which extend to ten or more plates, and were afterwards published by Aubert in albums. Perhaps the best of these collections are Fourberies de femmes en matière de sentiment...
 

Screwed again by feminine wiles.

 "...Baudelaire had this part of Gavarni’s work particularly in mind when he wrote…that ‘the true glory and the true mission of Gavarni and Daumier has been to complete Balzac.’ Certainly the pictures of Parisian society provided by the two artists perfectly complement each other. Daumier’s preoccupation was the working middle class with faces and figures heavily marked by life. Gavarni remained for the most part outside the humdrum bourgeois round. He preferred to show ‘youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.’
 

 You are free! You are simple! Have confidence in yourself! 
You! You are you! You! 
But you are a brat just for the pleasure of deceiving!

 "His pretty girls and sleek young men are bent on enjoyment. They live lives of graceful dissipation, with love intrigues and balls on the one hand, and pawnbrokers’ shops and debtors’ prisons on the other. Their motto is carpe diem, and they rarely think of the day or reckoning” (Ray, p. 217).

 

 On receipt of this letter mount a horse and hurry! 

Looking on the Avenue de Neuilly a yellow awning drops,

gray horse, Weller - 108 - Lanturn one lighted. Follow! 

Stop at the door of Sablonville house, a man and a woman go down

- this man was my lover - And this woman is yours!

  

“After the initial success of Caricaturana, Philipon proposed to Gavarni that he draw ‘Mme. Robert Macaire’ for Le Charivari. He responded with twelve studies of female deception in which he seems to have adopted Vigny’s belief that ‘A woman, more or less, is always Delilah.’ 

 

Allow me, Clara! Allow me, Clara!!... 
It is I who am just a fool with my stupid things ... 

you can have your velvet shawl ... Allow me, Clara! Come!
(The "I'll just die w/o it" routine).

"They made little impression, but three years later Gavarni returned to the theme in a subtler and more amiable way with one of his most searching and amusing series. In no. 37 he offers this exchange: ‘How did you know, papa, that I loved Mr. Leon?—Because you always talked to me about Mr. Paul.’ Gavarni’s playful mastery of female psychology is not the only attraction of the series. If Daumier could not draw a pretty woman, as is sometimes alleged, Gavarni at this period could hardly draw an ugly one” (Ray, pp. 220-221).
 

 How did you know, papa, that I loved Mr. Leon?

— Because you always talked to me about Mr. Paul.

 It is safe to say that the Delilah of the Bible practiced deception to a degree far in excess of these innocents at worst coquettes.

The name Delilah is a play on the Hebrew word, Laylah, or "night." Gavarni's dainty Delilahs do not possess the dark charms of their biblical counterpart; they may be fairly characterized as sunshine Delilahs, vexing, perhaps, but not cruel vixens. They perpetrate misdemeanors, not felonies. They may drive their men to distraction but are not bringing them to their knees as this latter-day destroyer of men did:

Yet the Layla here is based upon Patti Boyd, Eric Clapton's unrequited love and wife of his best friend, Beatle George Harrison. She didn't deceive him; he deceived himself.

Cherchez la femme? Non, mon ami. Cherchez le imbécile, the man who allows himself to fall for and continue with the femme who deceives. Is it Lola's fault that Herr Rath is an idiot?

The Blue Angel (1930), based upon Heinrich Mann's novel,  

Professor Unrat (1905).

One of the most interesting characters/goddesses in the world of the Old Testament is mentioned only  by obscure, indirect Biblical references. The ancient cities of Anathoth and Beth Anath are, in their earliest roots, identified with Anath, the sister of Baal, and Canaanite  goddess of love and war, one of the more dramatic job combos in the pagan pantheon. Square that, Sigmund Freud.

Which brings us back to Hollywood goddess of love and war Hedy Lamarr, whose 1942 U.S. Patent 2,292,387 for a secret communications device based on frequency hopping to aid radio-guided torpedoes was  a technological breakthrough. Though contemporary mechanical technology was not able to realize the device's potential, it was used in 1962 during the Cuban Missile-blockade crisis.

The device had the power to deceive the enemy's radio signals and prevent jamming a torpedo's wireless path.

Hedy Lamarr, secret sunshine Delilah.
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GAVARNI [pseudonym of Guillaume Sulpice Chevallier]. Fourberies de femmes. Paris: Chez Aubert gal. Véro-Dodat, [n.d., 1837]. [Together with:] Fourberies de femmes en matière de sentiment. 2e. série. Paris: Chez Bauger [and] Chez Bauger & Cie., [n.d., 1840-1841].

Two large quarto volumes bound in one. A total of sixty-four hand-colored lithographed plates, heightened with gum arabic, including twelve in the first series and fifty-two in the second.

Contemporary vertical-ribbed purple cloth, lettered in gilt on front cover.

Armelhault & Bocher 662-702; 1728-1739. Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book 150 and 151.
 

[DAUMIER, Honoré, illustrator]. Les Cent et un Robert-Macaire, composés et dessinés par M. H. Daumier, sur les idées et les légendes de M. Ch. Philipon, réduits et lithographiés par MM. ***; texte par MM Maurice Alhoy et Louis Huart. Paris: Chez Aubert et Cie, Éditeurs du Musée pour Rire, 1840 and 1839.

Two quarto volumes. [8], [200], [4, publisher’s advertisements]; [8], [204], [4, publisher’s advertisements] pp. With 101 hand-colored lithographed plates, heightened with gum arabic.
   

Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book 162. Vicaire III, cols. 31-32 (under Alhoy) and V, cols. 572-573 (under Philipon).     

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Images courtesy of David Brass.
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Of related interest:

Femme Fatales Go Down Under.   
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