Conducteur... j'avais pris vos messageries

Honoré Daumier's lithograph — his preferred medium, pulled from stone and hand-colored — lampoons early French railway travel. A stout, exasperated passenger leans from a coach marked *Messageries Générales*, gesturing wildly at a uniformed conductor below, while grotesquely caricatured fellow travelers crowd the carriage window. The figures carry the bulbous noses, rubbery lips, and exaggerated class markers typical of July Monarchy caricature, a visual shorthand Daumier deployed without apology to signal bourgeois pretension and working-class indignity alike. The print belongs to his *Physionomies des Chemins de Fer* series, skewering the chaos of France's railway boom. Daumier stands in direct descent from Gillray and Rowlandson, and his serial format — repeated characters, sequential social observation — fed directly into the grammar that became the comic strip.