"Les Parisiens dans l'attente de la fameuse comète" [The Parisians awaiting the famous comet]

Daumier made a whole series of lithographs recording various manifestations of behavioral hysteria that resulted from an astronomer’s false prediction that a comet would destroy the earth on June 13, 1857. In this one, successive registers of sky gazers recede to the right, all looking up, suggesting an infinite number of slack-jawed bourgeois echoing down the sidewalk.