Heureux Dénouement — Final Plate from *Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux Bois*

The last of ninety-eight plates in Töpffer's picture-story resolves everything in a church nave rendered in confident Gothic shorthand — pointed arches, rose windows, a pulpit from which a clergyman officiates. A procession of figures crowds the floor: the lanky, lovelorn Vieux Bois at centre, his beloved beside him, flanked by attendants and onlookers whose rounded, rubberised faces are Töpffer's signature. A small dog sleeps unbothered at the foreground edge. The eye sweeps left to right along a single horizontal frieze, the figures overlapping just enough to imply depth. Below runs the handwritten caption: Heureux dénouement de l'histoire de Monsieur Vieux Bois — Genève 1830. Töpffer's histoires en estampes — images paired with captions in deliberate sequence — established the grammar that newspaper strips and comic books would later inherit wholesale.