Aux Bains de Boulogne

Pen-and-ink drawing by the French caricaturist Cham (Amédée de Noé), likely prepared for reproduction as a wood engraving in a periodical such as *Le Charivari*. The scene shows a carriage half-submerged in the sea at the fashionable Boulogne bathing resort, its drunk coachman — rendered with the broad, contemptuous line typical of French comic journalism — steering helplessly into the waves while a passenger protests. The joke turns on class anxiety: a bourgeois bather at the mercy of a sottish working-class driver. Cham inherited the tradition of Daumier and Gavarni, whose lithographic social vignettes for *Le Charivari* directly fed the sequenced panel strips that would become the comic strip. Such single-image gag drawings, captioned below, are the immediate ancestors of the comic book page.