Voyageurs affamés se précipitant vers le buffet d'une station

A lithograph from Daumier's *Physionomies des chemins de fer* series, this plate captures the comic pandemonium of hungry rail passengers surging toward a station buffet counter. The crowd is rendered in Daumier's characteristic bold crayon line — faces grotesquely distorted by appetite and desperation, bodies compressed into a lurching mass, one small figure nearly trampled underfoot. The woman behind the counter regards the onslaught with weary alarm. Class caricature is central: bourgeois travelers stripped of dignity by hunger, their top hats and respectable coats made absurd. Daumier's lithographic work for *Le Charivari* sits squarely in the line from Hogarth's crowded moral tableaux and Rowlandson's comic humanity through to the sequential newspaper strip — individual panels telling a social joke through exaggerated physiognomy and compressed action that would directly seed the comic page.