Il a donc été bien méchant cette nuit…

Honoré Daumier's lithograph—his preferred medium, pulled from a greasy chalk drawing on limestone—shows two nightcapped figures leaning over a table, one thrusting a small, wide-eyed doll-like figure toward the other, who grins in complicit amusement. The exaggerated noses, slack mouths, and bulging eyes are hallmarks of Daumier's physiognomic caricature, a technique inherited from Lavater's pseudoscience and refined by Gillray and Rowlandson into political weaponry. Daumier's figures belong to the French lower-bourgeois and working classes he observed relentlessly. Published in the Charges d'expressions series, this print sits directly in the lineage—Hogarth's narrative sequence, the German Bilderbogen picture-sheet, Töpffer's proto-comics—from which the modern comic strip descended.