Où diable allez-vous donc comme ça ! — Nous allons faire un tour dans la forêt noire !

A quick-stroke pen-and-ink sketch — likely a working drawing for wood engraving or lithographic transfer — shows three bourgeois figures on a country road. Two men in top hats and frock coats exchange pleasantries with a woman in a crinoline, beside a signpost reading Bade (Baden-Baden, the fashionable German spa). The caption, in period argot, has one man ask where on earth they are headed; the answer: a stroll in the Black Forest. Cham (Amédée de Noé) was the most prolific French comic draughtsman of the Second Empire, working in the lineage of Daumier's Le Charivari lithographs and directly anticipating the sequential panel strips that would become the comic page. His society caricatures targeted leisure-class pretension — the mania for German spas among the Parisian haute bourgeoisie — with economy of line rather than physiognomic distortion. That restraint marks a stylistic pivot: from Gillray's grotesque excess toward the clean-contour gag drawing that strips like Ally Sloper and eventually American newspaper comics would inherit.