Gabriel Liquier penned cartoons under the aliases Trick and Trock for La Caricature in Paris. Around the time that cholera was peaking again in France in 1884, some of his miscellaneous drawings touched on the epidemic, and we shall collect them together here. (As usual, links to sources are embedded in the images.)
“Where are you going so quickly, Calino?”
“I am taking precautions against cholera: I’m off to buy a cordon sanitaire.”
“My little choleric, be very nice: don’t die without telling me if it’s Asian cholera or our cholera!”
“Are you suffering from sciatica? Oh, my poor sir, that is a symptom of cholera…”
“Not possible!”
“It’s a sciatic cholera.” (“Asiatic”)
(The same pun was recycled in 1892 in Le Journal amusant.)
“What is this note, madame?… What am I looking at! An appointment granted to a photographer!”
“But, my love, when you have cholera, how will I cure you with collodion if I don’t learn photography?”
“So, Mr. Guibollard, do they think the cholera microbe has been found?”
“Perfectly. It’s a certain comma microbe… I’m so sure of it that I no longer put punctuation in what I write!”
“The cholera from here is nothing, madame! But with us, everyone flees.”
“Yet you have only had one death…”
“That is true…, but it is that of the mayor!”
“A fire at the Porno-Naturalist Library.”
“In this time of cholera, it may be a sanitation measure.”
“Since the closing of my theater I have been looking for a remedy against cholera…. and I haven’t found it!”
“This poor director! He will never get his hands on a good formula!”
“So don’t be nervous, Mr. Fouinard: the Pyrenees will serve as a barrier against Spanish cholera.”
“Precisely… I let myself be told that someone would have said that there were no more Pyrenees!”
Sic Transit Pestilentia 