Où diable allez-vous donc comme ça ! — Nous allons faire un tour dans la forêt noire !

A quick-stroke pen-and-ink sketch — likely a working drawing for wood engraving or lithographic transfer — shows three bourgeois figures on a country road. Two men in top hats and frock coats exchange pleasantries with a woman in a crinoline, beside a signpost reading *Bade* (Baden-Baden, the fashionable German spa). The caption, in period argot, has one man ask where on earth they are headed; the answer: a stroll in the Black Forest. Cham (Amédée de Noé) was the most prolific French comic draughtsman of the Second Empire, working in the lineage of Daumier's *Le Charivari* lithographs and directly anticipating the sequential panel strips that would become the comic page. His society caricatures targeted leisure-class pretension — the mania for German spas among the Parisian haute bourgeoisie — with economy of line rather than physiognomic distortion. That restraint marks a stylistic pivot: from Gillray's grotesque excess toward the clean-contour gag drawing that strips like *Ally Sloper* and eventually American newspaper comics would inherit.