Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec originally created the design for this lithograph as a cover for a song sheet of a satiric monologue performed by Eugène Lemercier at the Paris cabaret Le Chat Noir. In 1893 Marie-François-Sadi Carnot, president of France, had fallen victim to liver disease. Both Lemercier and Toulouse-Lautrec connected the ills of the country with the illness of the president. In Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph, a doctor checks Carnot’s pulse and a nun offers him hot soup, while state business goes unattended. In a color version, the artist depicted Carnot with the yellow pallor of jaundice (a symptom of liver disease). Carnot’s presidency had indeed been tumultuous, due to the uprising of the followers of the reactionary general Georges Ernest Boulanger and the Panama Canal corruption scandal. In a clear sign of the disarray of the French state, Carnot was assassinated in an anarchist attack in 1894.