Frédéric Lemaître (1800-1876) was an actor who specialised in melodramas. Although the played important parts in plays by Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, he was never admitted to the Comédie-Française. His greatest success was his interpretation of Robert Macaire in 1823: deciding against the wishes of the play’s authors, he adopted an entirely different tack, turning a sombre and mediocre melodrama into a vast farce and achieving instant success with the public!
Robert Macaire and his stooge Bertrand became the icons of boastful rascals, cynical wheeler-dealers. They had a second life in the drawings of Honoré Daumier.
The lithograph represents Robert Macaire and his side-kick Bertrand in the costumes that guaranteed the success of the comedy : Bertrand in a long redingote with huge pockets, a broken down hat on his head, leans on his umbrella. Robert Macaire in a green coat, red pants, collar up to his chin, a scarf over his eyes, a squashed hat and dancing shoes, is holding a club.
Mayeux was a comic figure invented by Traviès. Coleric, coarse, lustful, Mayeux complains, carries on and gesticulates: a veritable catalogue of the faults attributed by journalists to the petty bourgeoisie under Louis-Philippe. In this series of prints, Traviès imagines him teamed up with Robert Macaire and Bertrand, in a comical situation based on the popular legend that women were irresistibly sexually attracted to ugly hunchbacks.