It was about this time that Meryon began to etch plates of antiquarian interest from old drawings or prints. Though they were commissioned for illustrations, it is evident, among other things from a letter of Baudelaire’s written in 1860, that Meryon himself developed a rather tiresome habit of research, both pedantic and eccentric in its methods. One of the best of these derivative etchings, the _Salle des Pas-Perdus_ (plate 35), after Ducerceau, dates from 1855, and _Le Pont-Neuf et la Samaritaine_ (plate 33) and _Le Pont-au-Change vers 1784_ (plate 34) were also etched in the same year. They are fine etchings, but do not arouse the same interest as Meryon’s first-hand impressions of the Paris of his own day. _Le Château de Chenonceau_, also after Ducerceau, and etched in a very dry manner, is a plate of 1856, and in the same year he etched, from photographs, the large panoramic view of _San Francisco_. More typical Meryons are the two queer etchings of 1855 and 1856 called _La Loi Solaire_ and _La Loi Lunaire_, in which he propounded very crazy views on morality, one of them being that an upright posture is the proper attitude for sleep, a theory which he himself carried into practice in later years, by passing the night between two upright boards with his arms supported by loops of rope to keep him from falling. _Le Pilote de Tonga_, a prose poem in a frame, etched in 1856, is the first of what grew, in the sixties, into a long series of etchings founded on his sketches and reminiscences of his early voyage to the South Seas. These filled an even larger place in his thoughts in his last years, but it is to be feared that the etchings of these subjects, of which a few specimens are here reproduced (plates 43-46), leave posterity rather cold.
The only etchings of any importance that Meryon produced after his release from confinement are some of the last views of Paris, done at the time when he was retouching his old plates of Paris and making the, not very judicious, alterations which distinguish their latest states. The new ones are: _Rue Pirouette_ (1860, plate 36), _Tourelle de la rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine_ (1861), which shows the house in which Marat was assassinated (plates 25, 26), _Rue des Chantres_ (1862, plates 27, 28), _Collège Henri IV_ (1864, plate 29), _Bain-froid Chevrier_ (1864, plate 30), _Le Ministère de la Marine_ (1866, plates 31, 32) and _L’ancien Louvre, vers 1650_ (1866, plate 38), in which, fulfilling a commission from the Chalcographie du Louvre, he returned to the study of his old love, Renier Zeeman. The _Rue des Chantres_ is incomparably the finest of these, but it can only be seen to real advantage in the very rare early states, one of which the British Museum possesses (plate 27), in which the spire, a recent addition to Notre-Dame designed by Viollet-le-Duc, soars into an empty sky, which was afterwards disfigured by the incongruous insertion of two bells and a device with the initials J. B. (plate 28). The streets of all the etchings of the sixties are filled with excited crowds or little groups of tall, unnatural looking people, and all kinds of curious monsters and allegorical figures hover in the sky or swoop in rapid flight across it. The _Collège Henri IV_ (plate 29) in some of its states, has for background a sea with sails and whales and sea-gods, and the figures in the foreground are the most extraordinary that Meryon ever drew.