Le Puits de Grenelle (The Grenelle Well)

Honoré Daumier's lithograph—published in his Mœurs Conjugales (Conjugal Customs) series—shows a top-hatted bourgeois father dangling a squirming child toward water while a bonneted wife looks on with theatrical horror. The caption mocks Parisian middle-class faith in the celebrated Grenelle artesian well, drilled 1833–41 amid enormous public excitement, by suggesting its water produces not health but filth. Daumier's line caricatures the bourgeoisie with the rubbery, exaggerated anatomy he inherited from Gillray and Rowlandson and passed forward to the comic strip: sequential panel gags, speech-adjacent captions, stock social types reduced to instantly readable silhouettes. This single-sheet lithograph, mass-printed and sold cheaply, is precisely the popular satirical broadside tradition—French, English, and German Bilderbogen alike—from which the comic book directly descends.