Le cheval est un aliment sain et d'une digestion facile...

A rearing white horse erupts from a man's fitful sleep, hooves lunging toward his prostrate body as he recoils into his pillow. The caption — 'The horse is a wholesome food and easily digested' — skewers the contemporary French debate over hippophagy: the legalization of horse-meat as cheap protein for the urban poor. This lithograph belongs to Daumier's Les Hippophages series, published in a Parisian illustrated journal. Daumier's crayon-on-stone line — loose, pressured, theatrically shadowed — descends directly from Gillray's and Rowlandson's etched nightmares, feeding forward into the sequential panel humor of early comic strips. The bourgeois sleeper's exaggerated terror is classic physiognomic class comedy: respectable men undone by vulgar necessity, a recurring engine of nineteenth-century print satire.