were various things in them
besides the power to excite a vague alarm. Daumier was perhaps a great
artist; at all events unsatisfied curiosity increased in proportion to
that possibility.

The first complete satisfaction of it was really in the long hours that
I spent in the little shop on the quay. There I filled my mind with
him, and there too, at no great cost, I could make a big parcel of these
cheap reproductions of his work. This work had been shown in the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts as it came from his hand; M. Champfleury, his biographer,
his cataloguer and devotee, having poured forth the treasures of a
precious collection, as I suppose they would be called in the case of an
artist of higher flights. It was only as he was seen by the readers of
the comic journals of his day that I could now see him; but I tried to
make up for my want of privilege by prolonged immersion. I was not able
to take home all the portfolios from the shop on the quay, but I took
home what I could, and I went again to turn over the superannuated
piles. I liked looking at them on the spot; I seemed still surrounded by
the artist's vanished Paris and his extinct Parisians. Indeed no quarter
of the delightful city probably shows, on the whole, fewer changes from
the aspect it wore during the period of Louis-Philippe, the time when
it will ever appear to many of its friends to have been most delightful.
The long line of the quay is unaltered, and the rare charm of the river.
People came and went in the shop: it is a wonder how many, in the course
of an hour, may lift the latch even of an establishment that pretends to
no great business. What was all this small, sociable, contentious
life but the great Daumier's subject-matter? He was the painter of the
Parisian bourgeois, and the voice of the bourgeois was in the air.

M. Champfleury has given a summary of Daumier's career in his smart
little _Histoire e la Caricature Moderne_, a record not at all abundant
in personal detail. The biographer has told his story better perhaps in
his careful catalogue of the artist's productions, the first sketch of
which is to be found in _L'Art_ for 1878. This copious list is Daumier's
real history; his life cannot have been a very different business from
his work. I read in the interesting publication of M. Grand-Carteret
(_Les Moeurs et la Caricature en France_ 1888) that our artist produced
nearly 4000 lithographs and a thousand drawings on wood, up to the time