Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet

Madame Charlet, however, a woman of determined spirit and an extreme Bonapartist, managed to give her boy a moderate education at the Lycée Napoléon, and was repaid by his lifelong affection.

He then, having from a very early age had a propensity for drawing, entered the atelier of the distinguished painter Baron Gros, and soon began issuing the first of those lithographed designs which eventually brought him renown.

[1] His Grenadier de Waterloo, 1817, with the motto "The Guard Dies and Does Not Surrender" (La Garde meurt et ne se rend pas)—a famous phrase frequently attributed to Cambronne but which he never uttered, and which cannot, perhaps, be traced farther than to this lithograph by Charlet—was particularly popular.

Later in his life there were also three exhibited oil pictures, the especially admired Episode in the Campaign of Russia (1836), the Passage of the Rhine by Moreau (1837), and Wounded Soldiers Halting in a Ravine (1843).

[1] His military subjects particularly delighted Charlet, and they found an energetic response in the popular heart where they kept alive a feeling of pride and regret for the recent past of the French nation and discontent with the present.