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From the exhibition

An armless veteran of the Hôtel des Invalides is hired as a guide for visitors, in order that he take no money from them

Amédée-Charles-Henri Cham · 1883

An armless veteran of the Hôtel des Invalides is hired as a guide for visitors, in order that he take no money from them
Cham (Amédée-Charles-Henri de Noé) draws a one-armed soldier in Napoleonic uniform — exaggerated nose, bicorne hat, comic grimace — confronting two bourgeois visitors in wide-brimmed yellow hats and layered skirts. The caption explains the bureaucratic joke: the *Invalides* administration appoints a limbless *invalide* as guide precisely so he cannot accept tips from foreign tourists. It is a lithograph, printed by Destouches, published in the *Actualités* series — the same vehicle that carried Honoré Daumier's political satire a generation earlier. Cham's caricature descends directly from Gillray and Rowlandson's grotesque physiognomy, filtered through French boulevard print culture. That lineage — single-image satirical panels with explanatory captions, serially numbered — is among the direct ancestors of the modern comic strip's visual grammar and panel-caption rhythm.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/