If Philipon had left it at that, the Pear affair would have made an amusing footnote in the history of caricature, but, from the inception of his newly invented meme, he began commissioning artists to use it in political cartoons. It spread more rapidly than earlier memes ever did, and not only in publications. As a result, it would be impossible to count all the pears that appeared in various venues in the following years. One factor in the Pears’ success might well have been the simplicity of the shape, which even a child could draw. In fact, many children did, if we are to believe the drawings of Philipon’s artists, who churned out Pear drawings first for La Caricature and, beginning in 1832, for Le Charivari as well. In a January 1833 edition of La Caricature, Auguste Bouquet depicted an old woman attempting to prevent three industrious little boys from defacing the wall of her house with pear drawings, shouting at them “Go draw that filth farther away, you little devils!”. A few months later, in Le Charivari, Traviès depicted a similar event in The Pear Has Become Popular, where he shows a street urchin drawing a pear on a wall; its caption announces: “This is how the walls of Paris are being decorated these days.”