CHAPTER X

MAYEUX AND ROBERT MACAIRE

A peculiar feature of French caricature, especially after political subjects were largely forbidden, was the creation of certain famous types who soon became familiar to the French public, and whose reappearances from day to day in new and ever grotesque situations were hailed with growing delight. Such were the Mayeux of Traviès and the Macaire and Bertrand of Daumier, who in course of time became as celebrated, in a certain sense, as the heroes of "The Three Musketeers." In his "Curiosités Esthétiques" Beaudelaire has told the story of the origin of Mayeux. "There was," he says, "in Paris a sort of clown named Le Claire, who had the run of various low resorts and theaters. His specialty was to make _têtes d'expression_, that is, by a series of facial contortions he would express successively the various human passions. This man, a clown by nature, was very melancholy and possessed with a mad desire for friendship. All the time not occupied in practice and in giving his grotesque performances he spent in searching for a friend, and when he had been drinking, tears of solitude flowed freely from his eyes. Traviès saw him. It was a time when the great patriotic enthusiasm of July was still at its height. A luminous idea entered his brain. Mayeux was created, and for a long time afterward this same turbulent Mayeux talked, screamed, harangued, and gesticulated in the memory of the people of Paris."

In a hundred different guises, in the blue blouse of the workman, the apron of the butcher, the magisterial gown of judge or advocate, this hunchback Mayeux, this misshapen parody upon humanity, endeared himself to the Parisian public. Virulent, salacious, corrupt, he was a sort of French Mr. Hyde--the shadow of secret weaknesses and vices, lurking behind the Dr. Jekyll of smug _bourgeois_ respectability; and the French public recognized him as a true picture of their baser selves. They laughed indulgently over the broad, Rabelaisian jests that unfailingly accompanied each new cartoon--jests which M. Dayot has admirably characterized as "seasoned with coarse salt, more German than Gallic, and forming a series of legends which might be made into a veritable catechism of pornography." This Mayeux series is not, strictly speaking, political in its essence. It touches upon all sides of life, without discrimination and without respect. It even trespasses upon the subject of that forbidden fruit, "Le Poire." In an oft-cited cartoon, Mayeux with extended arms, his head sunken lower than usual between his huddled shoulders, is declaiming: "Adam destroyed us with the apple; Lafayette has destroyed us with the pear!" And later, when repeated arrests, verdicts, fines, edicts had banished politics from the arena of caricature, Mayeux was still a privileged character. Like Chicot, the jester, who could speak his mind fearlessly to his "Henriquet," while the ordinary courtier cringed obsequiously, Mayeux shared the proverbial privilege of children and buffoons, to speak the truth. And oftentimes it was not even necessary for his creator, Traviès, to manifest any overt political significance; the public were always more than ready to look for it below the surface. In such a picture as that of Mayeux, in Napoleonic garb striking an attitude before a portrait of the Little Corporal and exclaiming, "_Comme je lui ressemble!_" they inevitably discovered a hint that there were other hypocrites more august than Mayeux who fancied themselves worthy of filling Napoleon's shoes.

Even more famous than Mayeux are the Macaire and Bertrand series, the joint invention of Philipon, who supplied the ideas and the text, and of Daumier, who executed the designs. According to Thackeray, whose analysis of these masterpieces of French caricature has become classic, they had their origin in an old play, the "Auberge des Adrets," in which two thieves escaped from the galleys were introduced, Robert Macaire, the clever rogue, and Bertrand, his friend, the "butt and scapegoat on all occasions of danger." The play had been half-forgotten when it was revived by a popular and clever actor, Frederick Lemaïtre, who used it as a vehicle for political burlesque. The play was suppressed, but _Le Charivari_ eagerly seized upon the idea and continued it from day to day in the form of a pictorial puppet show, of which the public never seemed to weary. Thackeray's summary of the characters of these two illustrious rascals can scarcely be improved upon:

"M. Robert Macaire [he says] is a compound of Fielding's 'Blueskin' and Goldsmith's 'Beau Tibbs.' He has the dirt and dandyism of the one, with the ferocity of the other: sometimes he is made to swindle, but where he can get a shilling more, M. Macaire will murder without scruple; he performs one and the other act (or any in the scale between them) with a similar bland imperturbability, and accompanies his actions with such philosophical remarks as may be expected from a person of his talents, his energies, his amiable life and character. Bertrand is the simple recipient of Macaire's jokes, and makes vicarious atonement for his crimes, acting, in fact, the part which pantaloon performs in the pantomime, who is entirely under the fatal influence of clown. He is quite as much a rogue as that gentleman, but he has not his genius and courage.... Thus Robert Macaire and his companion Bertrand are made to go through the world; both swindlers, but the one more accomplished than the other. Both robbing all the world, and Robert robbing his friend, and, in the event of danger, leaving him faithfully in the lurch. There is, in the two characters, some grotesque good for the spectator--a kind of 'Beggars' Opera' moral.... And with these two types of clever and stupid knavery, M. Philipon and his companion Daumier have created a world of pleasant satire upon all the prevailing abuses of the day."

The Macaire and Bertrand series were less directly political in their scope than that of Traviès's hunchback; at least, their political allusions were more carefully veiled. Yet the first of the series had portrayed in Macaire's picturesque green coat and patched red trousers no less a personage than the old "Poire" himself, and the public remembered it. When politics were banished from journalism they persisted in finding in each new escapade of Macaire and Bertrand an allusion to some fresh scandal, if not connected with the King himself, at least well up in the ranks of governmental hypocrites. And, although the specific scandals upon which they are based, the joint-stock schemes for floating worthless enterprises, the thousand-and-one plausible humbugs of the period, are now forgotten, to those who take the trouble to read between the lines, these masterpieces of Daumier's genius form a luminous exposition of the _morale_ of the government and the court circles.