Monsieur par suite de la fusion...

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his *Les Philanthropes du Jour* series shows two bourgeois men at a writing desk — one portly, bespectacled, and self-satisfied; the other lean and deferential, reaching toward a drawer. The French caption has the fat man explaining, with elaborate arithmetic, why the ruined investor receives almost nothing after administrative fees and liquidation costs; the victim responds that such generosity leaves him *stupéfait* — stupefied. Daumier uses the rounded, exaggerated physiognomy standard to French caricature of his era, the well-fed swindler contrasted against the hollow creditor, class warfare rendered in greasy crayon on stone. This tradition — from Hogarth's moral sequences through Gillray's grotesques to Daumier's serial newspaper plates — taught artists to advance narrative across sequential images, the direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel storytelling.