Page from *L'Assiette au Beurre*

Reduced to two colors and a scatter of hard black shapes, this page from the Paris satirical weekly L'Assiette au Beurre turns a public convenience into a small theater of graft. A jowly, cigarette-smoking attendant leans across his counter; before him sits a collection box on a saucer, and a shadowed patron looms at the right edge. The drawing throws away detail the way a poster does, letting silhouette carry the joke. The caption needles a count who ought to drop something in the box himself. By the 1900s the flat, high-contrast page had become a house manner for European satire, printed cheap and read fast. Sequence, caption, and caricature here operate as a single graphic unit, the same machinery a comic page would inherit.