Devil's Tail

A group of people representing all sorts of trades and occupations (featuring, in particular, an artist who looks like Grandville himself) plays a game of tug of war with the Devil’s tail.

The caption reads in the original French: Tirer le Diable par la queue. This saying doesn’t seem to have any satisfactory equivalent in English and is used to signify the struggle to make ends meet, to scrape by, hang on by one’s fingernails, and so forth.