Qu'il mourut!... (Les Horaces)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph burlesques French classical theater, showing two figures in Roman dress—a bearded old man gazing heavenward in theatrical rapture while a wide-eyed young woman grabs his arm in mock alarm. The title quotes Corneille's Horace (Act III), the old Horace's famous one-word answer when asked what his outnumbered son should have done: qu'il mourût—"that he die." Daumier published this in his Physionomies tragico-classiques series for Le Charivari, skewering the pomposity of Comédie-Française acting through grotesque facial exaggeration—open mouths, rolled eyes, stagey gestures. This comic deflation of high culture sits squarely in the tradition running from Gillray's actor caricatures through the German Bilderbogen, feeding directly into the sequential comic strip.