ever have been a romantic, though the _macabre_
romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal,
bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so
often lamentable and tender, in the spirit of a Voltaire doubled by a
Rabelais. There is honest and also shocking laughter in these early
illustrations. A _fantaisiste_, graceful, delicate--and
indelicate--emerged after the lad went up to Paris, as if he had
stepped out of the eighteenth century. Rops summed up in his book
plates, title-pages, and wood-cuts, illustrations done in a furious
speed, all the elegance, the courtly corruption, and Boucher-like
luxuriousness that may be detected in the moral _marquetrie_ of the
Goncourts. He had not yet said, "Evil, be thou my Good," nor had the
mystic delirium of the last period set in. All his afternoons must
have been those of a faun--a faun who with impeccable solicitude put
on paper what he saw in the heart of the bosk or down by the banks of
secret rivers. The sad turpitudes, the casuistry of concupiscence, the
ironic discolourations and feverish delving into subterranean moral
stratifications were as yet afar. He was young, handsome, with a
lithe, vigorous body and the head of an aristocratic Mephistopheles, a
head all profile, like the heads of Hungary--Hungary itself, which is
all profile. Need we add that after the death of his father he soon
wasted a fortune? But the reckless bohemian in him was subjugated by
necessity. He set to work to earn his bread. Some conception of his
labours for thirty-five years may be gleaned from the catalogue of his
work by Erastene Ramiro (whose real name is Eugene Rodrigues). Nearly
three thousand plates he etched, lithographed, or engraved, not
including his paintings or his experiments in various mediums, such as
_vernis mou_ and wood-engraving.

The coarse legends of old Flanders found in Rops their pictorial
interpreter. Less cerebral in his abounding youth he made Paris laugh
with his comical travesties of political persons, persons in high
finance, and also by his shrewd eye for the homely traits in the life
of the people. His street scenes are miracles of detail, satire, and
fun. The one entitled Spring is the most noted. That legacy of hate,
inherited from the 1830 poets, of the bourgeois, was a merry play for
Rops. He is the third of the trinity of caricature artists, Daumier
and Gavarni being the other two. The liberal pinch of Gallic salt in
th