ABSTRACT
When we descend from the pictures of Chardin to the scenes of Jeaurat, from the Illustres Françoises to the Bals de Bois, the Fêtes Roulantes, the Ecossaises the Histoire de Monsieur Guillaume le Cocker, to all the racy pictures, all the crass paintings of the street, or to the sketches so sharp in accent and so rich in verve, jotted by Caylus on the back of a poem by Vadé—we discover below the petty bourgeoisie, at the very bottom of this society, and as though outside the eighteenth century, a woman who seems of a race other than the women of her age. In the rude trades of Paris; in traffics carried on in the teeth of the wind, amid such hard labor as forces the limbs of woman to the work of man; from the market-woman of the Halles to the miserable creature who cries her load of wood all day at the Quai Saint-Bernard, we meet a being who is woman only by virtue of her sex, and who is less a woman than a clod. Bouchardon in his Cries of Paris has captured her strong figure, her mannish silhouette; his powerful drawings reveal the virile grossness, the masculinity of all these women of burden, under their stout, stiff woollens and fustian. 1
