Théophile Gautier, one of the leading lights of 1830s Romanticism, is portrayed here as a Middle Eastern pasha, with his adored cats replacing books on his bookshelves. The author of Jeunes France (1833), Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), and Émaux et Camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852) was also one of the most influential literary and theatre critics of his time. In La Presse of March 21, 1854, he reviewed the Pantheon with a good dose of irony and self-deprecating humor, but not without showing great insight by connecting the principle of noisy processions to their roots in Antiquity: “What are these grotesque Panathenaic Games that have been folded three or four times in order to fit onto a single, huge sheet? These monsters, statuettes, nutcrackers, kobolds, roly-polies, and marionettes represent recent literature, forming a burlesque Pantheon in honor of the more or less brilliant literary luminaries of our era.”