Notre bon allié le Pacha d'Égypte…

A lithograph from Daumier's *Les Baigneurs* series shows two gaunt, exaggeratedly thin men seated on a changing-room bench in striped bathing drawers, their limbs rendered with grotesque anatomical elongation. The figure at left gestures knowingly while apparently discussing European geopolitics—the Egyptian Pasha, Syria, Ottoman affairs—topics that consumed French public debate during the 1840 Eastern Crisis. Printed by lithographic transfer and hand-colored, the sheet sits squarely in the French tradition of Philipon's satirical press—*La Caricature*, *Le Charivari*—which translated Gillray's and Rowlandson's English print-satire energy into mass-produced political commentary. That same sequential, exaggerated figure-drawing logic fed directly into the illustrated humour sheets and eventually the comic strip.