In a dark affair, one of the lesser known volumes of the human comedy, Balzac used a story - the mysterious kidnapping, during the First Empire, of a senator informed of the plot conceived by Fouché against Napoleon Bonaparte - to write a book in which he used his novelistic talent to serve a political and police plot.

The historical characters seem to draw all their substance here from paper creatures as present as Michu, the faithful among the faithful, or as the intrepid Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, also in love with one and the other of his twin cousins. On these relationships of storytelling with history, imagination and reality, Baptiste-Marrey delivers in his reading the reflections of a contemporary writer anxious to underline the importance of this text, which is considered one of the founding works of crime fiction in France.