Note 24 — Chapter XV · CARICATURES OF WOMEN AND MATRIMONY.

Two admiring friends have written the life of Gavarni, the incomparable caricaturist of la femme; and they tell us just how and where and when the artist acquired his "subtle and profound knowledge" of the sex. It is but too plain that he knew but one class of women, the class that lives by deluding fools. "During all one year, 1835," say these admiring biographers, "it seems that in the life, the days, the thoughts of Gavarni, there was nothing but la femme. According to his own expression, woman was his 'grand affair.'" He was in love, then? By no means. Our admiring authors proceed to describe this year of devotion to la femme as a period when "intrigues were mingled together, crossed and entangled with one another; when passing inclinations, the fancies of an evening, started into being together with new passions; when rendezvous pressed upon rendezvous; when there fell upon Gavarni a rain of perfumed notes from the loves of yesterday, from the forgotten loves of last month, which he inclosed in one envelope, as he said, 'like dead friends in the same coffin.'"[24]