Between 1840 and 1842, the same years in which Balzac develops what will be the Comédie Humaine, Léon Curmer published Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. The work takes shape by the collaboration between caricaturists and writers and includes Honoré de Balzac who contributed to the project writing two items: the Épicier and La femme comme il faut.Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, defined in the subtitle like a moral Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle, is one of the greatest examples of "panoramic literature", as defined by Walter Benjamin (Benjamin 1979). In this work there is caricature and physiological determinism used to portray -and not simply describe- human and social types that populated Paris and the Province. The introduction of Léon Curmer and Jules Janin places the global project of the work under the label of 'tableau', already used by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (Mercier 1782).On the one hand, the Humors comes out from the idea of classifying men, emptied of their subjectivity and degraded to social types, like the animals and plants species in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. For this reason, the mise en page (each work item is structured type, tête de page, cul de lampe), helps to create a trans-text (Genette 1997) that is evident for the reader of the time, nourished by Buffon and Cuvier’s works. On the other hand, the intention avowedly "serious" that has to take care to explain, with a pedagogical intention, French people to the French readers, suggests a second hypothesis: the whole society is laughable because the bourgeoisie of the Louis Philippe reign is ridiculous.The paper aims to investigate the type of satire that emerges from the Opera, with a particular attention for the Épicier by Balzac.