You know it's been a bad day when...

...as depicted in in the painting, after just minding your business, all of a sudden you have seventeen people hanging off your tail...

there's random nudity, a person (dead?) on the ground, and even worse,

part of your tail has fallen off.

Seriously, you're just being a devil, walking around with a weird, non-effective pitchfork that is missing the middle tine and the villagers get all snotty and start pulling on you. How rude.

This is the painting "Les Parisiens tirant le diable par le queue" by Jean Veber and it's housed in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris. It's worth a visit, especially since it is free and has many entertaining oddities such as this painting.

The problem with such a painting is that it awakens a bad case of what I call "teh* curiosity." Who can't look at this and think, what the heck is the back story on this? Did the devil kill the naked person on the ground? Why did the villagers think it was a good idea to hang onto his tail? Is this some literary reference or was the painter just whacked out on paint fumes? Is it even possible for a devil's tail to be pulled off? Darn you, painting! You have awoken a deluge of questions.

*"the" is intentionally misspelled.