In a family house in the hamlet of Camera, aptly named, at Centuri in Cap Corse, glass plates were found protected in an old travel trunk of wood and boar skin: the memoirs of a travelling amateur, Mathieu Micheli, a major pharmacist in the colonial troops who arrived at Pondicherry on 24 April 1910. For Marcel Fortini it was tempting, almost a century later, to follow the routes of his forebear, while Jérôme Camilly engaged his imagination and visibly darkened his notepads.

“There was no point pursuing a past in the hope of finding a lost treasure or a hidden truth; it was better to free myself from the times of yesteryear by recording what the city and its inhabitants offered me, with dignity, in their present realities, which I took full force.” — Marcel Fortini