Page:The Etchings of Charles Meryon.djvu/29

 selves, which, as first completed in 1854, the year of this publication, had been perfectly normal.

Another of the etched poems, "L'Espérance," accompanies Le Pont-au-Change. After this, two more of the "Eaux-Fortes" remain to be noticed, and they are by general agreement the finest of the whole set: La Morgue and L'Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris, both etched in 1854. La Morgue (plate 20) combines a masterly distribution of black and white spaces and a perfectly successful treatment of the windows, roofs and chimneys, which rise in a curious succession of different levels from the riverside, with a motive of poignant human interest in the dramatic group that bears, on the left, the body of a drowned man from the Seine towards the "Doric little Morgue," as Browning calls it, on the right. The associations of the building, irresistibly suggested by this incident, are explained in the pathetic little poem, "L'Hôtellerie de la Mort" (plate 21), Meryon's finest effort in verse, etched on two separate plates and intended to accompany La Morgue, but so rare that it very seldom does so. "The bed and the table that the City of Paris offers gratis at any time to its poor children," we can imagine what they are—a marble slab, with water dripping down it, under that roof so magnificently etched.

"Puissiez-vous ne point voir Là sur le marbre noir De quelqu'âme chérie La navrante effigie!"

The poem was evidently completed originally in the first column, ending with Meryon's name, address and date, to which he added as an afterthought a second column of verses full of consoling thoughts and ending with words of faith and hope about the expansion of a flower "à la fraiche corolle, à la sainte auréole," a flower of love and happiness, from the germ that is in man's heart. In the impression at the British Museum, words of bad omen, like "Mort," "Misère," "Plaisir," are printed in red, and the good words, "Dieu,"