La fortune fait oublier les amis

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his signature medium, printed in crayon-worked grease on stone — shows a stout, elaborately dressed woman gesturing with theatrical condescension toward a slight, hat-in-hand young man who looks up at her with wide-eyed appeal. The title, *Fortune makes one forget one's friends*, frames a scene of class betrayal: new money turning its back on old loyalty. Daumier exaggerates her bulk and self-importance against his diminutive, hollowed figure with precisely the corporeal cruelty he inherited from Rowlandson and Gillray. His serial work for *La Caricature* and *Le Charivari* — hundreds of numbered plates targeting bourgeois vanity and social climbing — forms the direct bridge between 18th-century British print satire and the sequential narrative panels that would define the modern comic strip.