*Mlle Leucothoé, Rôle de Phèdre*, from *Un Autre Monde*

Two scenes sit one above the other. On the stage a grand tragedy is underway, an actress in pink declaiming, a stiff hero in classical dress at center, hunting hounds milling at their feet, all beneath a frieze of leering carved masks. Below, in the pit, Grandville gives us the orchestra as a row of monsters whose heads have become their instruments: a man crowned with a French horn, another whose skull is a lyre, a face swallowed by a bassoon's bell. The gag folds performer into thing, the metamorphosis Grandville returned to again and again. Splitting the sheet into upper and lower registers, he sets the polished illusion of the theater against the grotesque machinery producing it. The instrument-headed players are pure cartoon, a visual metaphor made flesh.