Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois, Plate 15

Two vignettes side by side, separated by a ruled line — the basic grammar Töpffer was inventing as he drew. Left panel: Monsieur Vieux Bois slumped in a chair consults a physician, both figures rendered in Töpffer's loose, economical line, legs splayed, expressions exaggerated but legible. Right panel: outdoors now, a doorway framing the action, Vieux Bois extends his arms toward a peasant woman accompanied by a donkey — the caption reads M. Vieux Bois prend le lait d'ânesse. The eye moves left to right, cause then consequence, exactly as a reader would learn to follow a newspaper strip decades later. Töpffer's Geneva picture-stories, circulated in handmade albums before lithographic publication, gave sequential art its first deliberate formal system: repeated characters, panel borders, and captions working together to carry narrative across a page.