Les Robert-Macaire remains Daumier's best-known series, and its contemporary popularity was immense. Baudelaire wrote about it and the Histoire ancienne in his essay on French caricaturists, and Audebert issued it in an edition of 2,500 copies, larger than any other series. So persistent was the demand that six thousand copies of the series in reduced format were issued in 1839. Caricaturana first appeared, like many of Daumier's works, in Le charivari, and when politics became a forbidden topic, Daumier and Philipon turned to satire. "If they could not attack Louis Philippe directly, they could at least show the kind of society that flourished under his gross and venal regime. Taking the flamboyant and florid swindler Macaire from the character that Frdrick Lematre had created in a hack melodrama called L'Auberge des adrets, they showed him and his inseparable companion, the dejected and meager Bertrand, ranging through all kinds of commercial enterprise, in the stock market, in the banks, in the courts, and in dozens of other public settings, never failing to find eager dupes" (Ray). Daumier even works himself into the series, with an encounter with Robert-Macaire in plate 78. Ray notes that although Daumier's designs are superb in themselves "they would be incomplete without the wit and point of Philipon's captions." Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 161 and 163.