An armless veteran of the Hôtel des Invalides is hired as a guide for visitors, in order that he take no money from them

Cham (Amédée-Charles-Henri de Noé) draws a one-armed soldier in Napoleonic uniform — exaggerated nose, bicorne hat, comic grimace — confronting two bourgeois visitors in wide-brimmed yellow hats and layered skirts. The caption explains the bureaucratic joke: the Invalides administration appoints a limbless invalide as guide precisely so he cannot accept tips from foreign tourists. It is a lithograph, printed by Destouches, published in the Actualités series — the same vehicle that carried Honoré Daumier's political satire a generation earlier. Cham's caricature descends directly from Gillray and Rowlandson's grotesque physiognomy, filtered through French boulevard print culture. That lineage — single-image satirical panels with explanatory captions, serially numbered — is among the direct ancestors of the modern comic strip's visual grammar and panel-caption rhythm.