“An etching by the latter of a riverside view through the arch of a bridge is like a link between Meryon and Piranesi,” says D.S.  MacColl.  Meryon also studied under the tuition of a painter named Phelippes.  He went to Belgium in 1856 on the invitation of the Duc d’Aremberg, and in 1858 he was sent to Charenton suffering from melancholy and delusions.  He left in a year and returned to Paris and work; but, as Baudelaire wrote, a cruel demon had touched the brain of the artist.  A mystic delirium set in.  He ceased to etch, and evidently suffered from the persecution madness.  In every corner he believed conspiracies were hatching.  He often disappeared, often changed his abode.  Sometimes he would appear dressed gorgeously at a boulevard cafe in company with brilliant birds of prey; then he would be seen slinking through mean streets in meaner rags.  There are episodes in his life that recall the career of another man of genius, Gerard de Nerval, poet, noctambulist, suicide.  It is known that Meryon destroyed his finest plates, but not in a mad fit.  Baudelaire says that the artist, who was a perfectionist, did not wish to see his work suffer from rebiting, so he quite sensibly sawed up the plates into tiny strips.  That he was suspicious of his fellow-etchers is illustrated in the story told by Sir Seymour Haden, who bought several of his etchings from him at a fair price.  Two miles away from the atelier the Englishman was overtaken by Meryon.  He asked for the proofs he had sold, “as they were of a nature to compromise him”; besides, from what he knew of Haden’s etchings he was determined that his proofs should not go to England.  Sir Seymour at once returned the etchings.  Now, whether Meryon’s words were meant as a compliment or the reverse is doubtful.  He was half crazy, but he may have seen through a hole in the millstone.

Frederick Keppel once met in Paris an old printer named Beillet who did work for Meryon.  He could not always pay for the printing of his celebrated Abside de Notre Dame, a masterpiece, as he hadn’t the necessary ten cents.  “I never got my money!” exclaimed the thrifty printer.  Enormous endurance, enormous vanity, diseased pride, outraged human sentiment, hatred of the Second Empire because of the particular clause in the old Napoleonic code relating to the research of paternity; an irregular life, possibly drugs, certainly alcoholism, repeated rejections by the academic authorities, critics, and dealers of his work—­these and a feeble constitution sent the unfortunate back to Charenton, where he died February 14, 1868.  Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, had only preceded him to a lunatic’s grave six months earlier.  Inasmuch as there is a certain family likeness among men of genius with disordered minds and instincts, several comparisons might be made between Meryon and Baudelaire.  Both were great artists and both were born with flawed, neurotic systems.  Dissipation and misery followed as a matter of course.