Page from *Histoire de la Sainte Russie*

A full page of the history unfurls as a column of unequal panels, small square vignettes alternating with wide friezes. Figures brawl, process, and tumble; at the foot of the sheet, bodies sprawl beneath a great wheel. Doré varies panel size to control tempo, a tight scene for a beat, a broad band for a crowd, exactly the pacing a modern cartoonist plots. Look for the streaks trailing his running figures: hand-drawn motion lines, decades before the comic strip made them a convention. The whole book runs some five hundred images across two hundred pages, a sustained picture-narrative built for laughs. Printed in cheap wood engraving, it was meant to be flipped through quickly, the eye supplying the movement between frames.