and if necessary, going hungry. Years with André Gill In 1878, Émile obtained a letter of recommendation from Étienne Carjat to approach André Gill, the best-known caricaturist of the day, for a job. Gill had made his fame a decade earlier by publishing La Lune, a periodical critical of Napoleon III. His presses were smashed and he was incarcerated. He started La Lune Rousse in 1876 to continue his work. By this time, he had moved beyond attacking individuals to making observations on the ludicrousness of conformist bourgeois values in general. However, the government was becoming increasingly liberal, leaving him with few big-name targets. As a result, La Lune Rousse closed in 1879. Émile Courtet's job as one of several assistants to Gill was to complete the backgrounds; he may have done a few of the illustrations by himself. During this process, he developed a style of caricature based on Gill's. Gill's trademark was the large, recognizable head of the target (with a fairly benign expression) atop a small puppet body (doing something ridiculous). Clearly, it was based on Fantoche puppetry. Émile took this style and added touches to suggest movement and imagery from the rest of Guignol puppetry. At about this time, he adopted the pseudonym of Émile Cohl. The meaning of "Cohl" is obscure: it may be from the pigment known as "kohl", or perhaps it means that Émile stuck to his mentor Gill like glue ("colle" in French). Perhaps it was chosen because it sounded exotic. The visual signature of a paste-pot appears in a few of Cohl's caricatures. Adolphe Thiers was succeeded as president by Patrice MacMahon, duc de Magenta, a conservative monarchist who had been at Sedan. He became steadily less popular under the assault of caricatures. One of these, "Aveugle par Ac-Sedan", a French pun on "accidentally blind" and "Bungler at Sedan", put its creator, Émile Cohl, in jail on 11 October 1879, making him instantly famous. Three months later, MacMahon resigned in disgrace—the caricaturists liked to believe that they were responsible. He was succeeded by Jules Grévy, who transferred real power from the post of president to the prime minister and legislature. This led to a period of internal stability and prosperity for France. Through Gill, Cohl (as he was now known) had become acquainted with an artistic circle calling themselves the Hydropathes. The group was united by various "modern" ideas and a