Idéale Advertisement — Rue Barrée, On Roule Sans Douleurs (Color)

— Advertisement —
AVEC LA SELLE ” IDÉALE ”

ON ROULE SANS DOULEURS !..

On the road sign at the left, in lettering at the limit of legibility:

POLITE IZIDORE
ENTREPRENEUR
RUE BARRÉE

[A color advertising card printed in four flat inks, dark blue, orange, pale green and white, on a
solid blue ground. Two riders cross the picture from left to right over a stretch of broken paving.
The one on the left is a heavy man in a green check suit and cap, grinning, one hand raised with a
cigarette in it, entirely at ease; his machine has no tires at all, only bare wheels, and it is
riding straight over the cobbles. The one on the right is thin and green in the face, jaw clenched,
rising off the saddle with his eyes screwed shut; his machine has fat white tires. A road sign at
the left names the contractor who dug the street up, a bird sits on top of it, and a saddle floats
in the upper right of the picture with a cigarette drawn beside it.

The joke is that the comfortable rider is the one on the worse bicycle, because the difference
between them is not the tires but the saddle. The Idéale badge is drawn twice, once as the floating
saddle and once on the setts under the left-hand rider’s front wheel.

The archive holds a second, quite different treatment of the same joke and the same slogan: a
monochrome line drawing on a country road, with the sign reading ZIDOR PASPARTOU, Antrepreneur,
ROUTE BARRÉE, geese in the road and a chateau behind, filed as document 69426. This card is
neither a color version nor a redraw of that one. The two are separate designs sharing one gag: the
street is RUE BARRÉE here and the road is ROUTE BARRÉE there, the contractor has a different comic
name, the composition is reversed and the tagline is plural here and singular there. The pair is
worth keeping together for exactly that reason.

The card prints no date and carries no printer’s imprint.]