Langlumé éditeur (circa 1820 )Custodian of newspapers of the City of Chartres. Caricature. Around 1820. Lithography. [305 x 460]. Curious laid proof, in beautiful colours of the time, carefully washed (with small restorations on the back, marked at the place of the folds), increased with virulent apostrophes in pen and sepia ink, attributable to the model here portrayed. All margins. This plate was engraved by Alavoine himself. After Jacques Cellerier, he was the second architect commissioned by Vivant Denon to carry out the construction of this monumental fountain in the shape of an elephant surmounted by a palanquin, which was to convey water from the Ourcq canal via the Saint-Martin canal, and to be installed on the Place de la Bastille. After the fall of Napoleon, the project was abandoned, replaced by a statue of Paris, made by Jean-Pierre Cortot (1787-1843), the work still entrusted to Alavoine. The Three Glorious Revolutions (July 1830) interrupted this new project. It was finally the July column that was erected on the square. The circular basin and the white marble base on which it rests are all that remains of the original fountain project. The elephant was never made of bronze, but from 1814 to 1846 a life-size plaster model by the sculptor Pierre Charles Bridan was erected in the square, before being destroyed. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo made it Gavroche's refuge: "It was an open den for the one to whom all the doors were closed. It seemed as if the old miserable mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with warts, moulds and ulcers, staggering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a colossal beggar begging in vain for alms with a benevolent look in the middle of the crossroads, had had pity on this other beggar, on the poor pygmy who went away without shoes on his feet, without a ceiling on his head, blowing in his fingers, dressed in rags, fed on what was thrown away. That's what the Bastille elephant was for. " The model complai