Two-Panel Page from *L'Assiette au Beurre*

Two panels, stacked and read top to bottom, share the same acid-green ground and the same cast of top-hatted men in funereal black. In the first, one gentleman presses a small red decoration on another, who protests with open hands; in the second, a knot of near-identical officials listens as one lectures with a raised finger. The joke, spelled out in the captions, is the undignified scramble for a Legion of Honor ribbon. What matters for our story is the structure. The reader's eye moves from box to box in time, the flat green voids pushing the figures forward like cut paper. Strip a page like this of its words and you have the wordless sequence Caran d'Ache made his signature: pictures that carry the beat of a joke by themselves.