Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois, Plate 35

Two vignettes read left to right across a single horizontal plate. In the left panel, a stout woman dries herself on a riverbank while a spindly, top-hatted Mr. Vieux Bois rows toward her, a church tower and mountains filling the background in loose, scratchy ink. The right panel collapses the distance: he has reached her, she tumbles into the bow of his skiff, and he rows hard away across open water, trees receding behind them. Töpffer's line is rapid and expressive—figures rubbery, faces caricatured, skies sketched with swift hatching. The French captions below each vignette drive the gag forward. These lithographed picture-stories, circulated privately before print publication, are the direct ancestors of the modern comic strip: sequential panels, speech-free captions, continuous narrative, one absurd protagonist across ninety-eight plates.