Excusez, regard' donc la grosse Fifine...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his medium of choice for mass-circulation satire — shows two bathers submerged to the shoulders in a public river bath, its rough wooden barrier sign reading *Bains des Dames à 4 sous*. The figures, rendered with Daumier's characteristic exaggerated physiognomy, peer and gesture at an unseen third woman; the caption mocks working-class female bodies with the blunt cruelty routine in bourgeois French comic press of the July Monarchy. Published in the *Les Baigneurs* series, it sits squarely in the tradition running from Rowlandson's bawdy aquatints through Daumier's own *La Caricature* and *Le Charivari* — periodical print satire that taught readers to read sequential panels, type-characters, and visual punchlines, the direct institutional ancestor of the comic strip.