By Arlette Farge, from The Allure of the Archives, published this month for the first time in English by Yale University Press. Farge is a historian of eighteenth-century France and the author, most recently, of Effusion et tourment, le récit des corps. Translated from the French by Thomas Scott-Railton.

The inventory room is sepulchral. Someone decided that central heating wasn’t needed here, so cold, damp air is continually drifting down from the high ceilings. Prison-issue gray iron tables line the length of walls stacked high with volumes. Their purpose is to allow for the consultation of the inventories that…