let who
did work for Meryon. He could not always pay for the printing of his
celebrated Abside de Notre Dame, a masterpiece, as he hadn't the
necessary ten cents. "I never got my money!" exclaimed the thrifty
printer. Enormous endurance, enormous vanity, diseased pride, outraged
human sentiment, hatred of the Second Empire because of the particular
clause in the old Napoleonic code relating to the research of
paternity; an irregular life, possibly drugs, certainly alcoholism,
repeated rejections by the academic authorities, critics, and dealers
of his work--these and a feeble constitution sent the unfortunate back
to Charenton, where he died February 14, 1868. Baudelaire, his
critical discoverer, had only preceded him to a lunatic's grave six
months earlier. Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among
men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons
might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire. Both were great artists
and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems. Dissipation and
misery followed as a matter of course.

Charles Meryon was, nevertheless, a sane and a magnificent etcher. He
executed about a hundred plates, according to Burty. He did not avoid
portraiture, and to live he sometimes manufactured pot-boilers for the
trade. To his supreme vision was joined a miraculous surety of touch.
Baudelaire was right--those plates, the Paris set, so dramatic and
truthful in particulars, could have been sold if Meryon, with his
wolfish visage, his fierce, haggard eyes, his gruff manner, had not
offered them in person. He looked like a vagabond very often and too
often acted like a brigand. The Salon juries were prejudiced against
his work because of his legend. Verlaine over again! The etchings were
classic when they were born. We wonder they did not appeal
immediately. To-day, if you are lucky enough to come across one, you
are asked a staggering price. They sold for a song--when they did
sell--during the lifetime of the artist. Louis Napoleon and Baron
Haussmann destroyed picturesque Paris to the consternation of Meryon,
who to the eye of an archaeologist united the soul of an artist. He
loved old Paris. We can evoke it to-day, thanks to these etchings,
just as the Paris of 1848 is forever etched in the pages of Flaubert's
L'Education Sentimentale.

But there is hallucination in these etchings, beginning with Le
Stryge, and its demoniac leer, "insatiable vampire, l'eternelle
luxure." T