Jean-Baptiste Léon Say, 'President No. 3'

Carlo Pellegrini ('Ape') renders the French statesman and economist Léon Say — grandson of Jean-Baptiste Say, thrice president of the French Senate — as a rotund, self-satisfied figure in dark frock coat, one hand tucked behind his back, the other drawn across his substantial girth. The caption 'President No. 3' identifies his third Senate presidency with dry Vanity Fair irony. Pellegrini exaggerates Say's barrel chest and short legs to comic effect, encoding a standard class-conscious joke about bourgeois prosperity. The caricature carries no ethnic distortion beyond its usual grotesquerie. Politically, Say was a moderate republican and free-trade liberal; Vanity Fair's choice of him signals British admiration for a Francophone economist congenial to laissez-faire orthodoxy.