Parole d'honneur Mme. Frénouillet

Honoré Daumier's lithograph from his Les Baigneurs series shows two bathers in a bathhouse exchanging glasses—a lean, dark-haired attendant and a stout, loosely dressed woman whose body Daumier renders with his characteristic exaggerated volume. The class comedy is the point: bourgeois bathing culture, newly fashionable in July Monarchy France, viewed with affectionate but pointed mockery. The woman's bulk and the man's obsequious thinness play physical types against each other in the tradition Daumier inherited from Rowlandson and Gillray. Printed for Le Charivari, the Parisian satirical journal, these numbered lithograph plates—cheap, widely circulated, sequentially published—form a direct ancestor of the comic strip: recurring characters, visual punchlines, and caption-dependent gags in serialized print form.