"Monsieur Babinet prévenu par sa portière de la visite de la comète" [Mr. Babinet warned by his concierge of the arrival of the comet]

Honoré Daumier made a series of lithographs recording various manifestations of the public hysteria that resulted from an astronomer’s prediction in mid-1857—later proven false, of course—that a comet was about to destroy the earth. In the mid-nineteenth century, sky-gazing became accessible to the amateur, meaning that observation of the cosmos with a telescope was no longer restricted to so-called experts. Too often, however, possession of a telescope did not mean access to useful information. The man crouching at the telescope in this print is the gentleman-astronomer Babinet, who looks in the opposite direction of the comet while his concierge, with eyes protruding and mouth agape, attempts to alert him to it. Resource: Martha Ward and Anne Leonard, Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France, exh. cat., Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2007, p. 32–34.