is well dressed.  His silk hat is shiny, his mustache curled in the true Adolphe fashion.  His face is vile.  The woman cries aloud and protects herself with her hands.  In Marthe Baraquin, by Rosny senior, you will find the material for this picture, though Legrand found it years ago in the streets.  Unpleasant, truly, yet a more potent sermon on man’s cruelty to woman than may be found in a dozen preachments, fictions, or the excited outpourings at a feminist congress.  Legrand presents the facts of the case without comment, except the irony—­such dismal irony!—­of the title.  In this he is the true pupil of Rops.

However, he does not revel long among such dreary slices of life.  The Poe illustrations are grotesque and shuddering, but after all make believe.  The plate of The Black Cat piles horror on horror’s head (literally, for the demon cat perches on the head of the corpse) and is, all said, pictorial melodrama.  The Berenice illustration is, we confess, a little too much for the nerves, simply because in a masterly manner Legrand has exposed the most dreadful moment of the story (untold by Poe, who could be an artist in his tact of omission).  The dental smile of the cataleptic Berenice as her necrophilic cousin bends over the coffin is a testimony to a needle that in this instance matches Goya’s and Rops’s in its evocation of the horrific.  We turn with relief to the ballet-girl series.  The impression gained from this album is that Legrand sympathises with, nay loves, his subject.  Degas, the greater and more objective artist, nevertheless allows to sift through his lines an inextinguishable hatred of these girls who labour so long for so little; and Degas did hate them, as he hated all that was ugly in daily life, though he set forth this ugliness, this mediocrity, this hatred in terms of beautiful art.  Legrand sees the ugliness, but he also sees the humanity of the ballateuse.  She is a woman who is brought up to her profession with malice aforethought by her parents.  These parents are usually noted for their cupidity.  We need not read the witty history of the Cardinal family to discover this repellent fact.  Legrand sketches the dancer from the moment when her mother brings her, a child, to undergo the ordeal of the first lesson.

The tender tot stands hesitating in the doorway; one hand while holding the door open seems to grasp it as the last barrier of defence that stands between her and the strange new world.  She is attired in the classical figurante’s costume.  Behind, evidently pushing her forward, is the grim guardian, a bony, forbidding female.  Although you do not see them, it is an easy feat to imagine the roomful of girls and dancing master all staring at the new-comer.  The expression on the child’s face betrays it; instinctively, like the generality of embarrassed little girls, her hand clasps her head.  In less than a minute she will weep.