Dieu de Dieu! mais c'est un pppolisson…

A lithograph — Daumier's preferred weapon — shows a seated bourgeois woman of exaggerated bulk recoiling from a lean, gesticulating man who crowds her chair, while a third figure lurks in the background. The French caption brands the intruder a scoundrel (*polisson*), stammered in outrage. Daumier deploys the rubber-faced grotesquerie he refined for *La Caricature* and *Le Charivari*: ballooned bodies signaling bourgeois excess, sharp features marking the aggressor as socially predatory. The class caricature is deliberate and period-typical — bulk meant moral softness, thinness cunning. This tradition of sequential printed satire, running from Hogarth's narrative plates through Rowlandson and Gillray to Daumier, taught readers to parse character through exaggerated physique — the foundational grammar from which the comic strip directly descended.