Route document

The route document is the name given to the companion piece that the Appendix of intervals requires and does not contain: the list of routes along which the appendix figures were supposedly measured. It has not been recovered. Both of the descriptions that survive call it an itinéraire, and neither was written by anyone who knew what it was.

The first description

The first is a line in a loss inventory drawn up after the flood at the Saint-Maclou-la-Brière school, when the lower storeroom took water to a height recorded as knee-high against the plaster. The inventory was made for insurance and lists what could not be dried.

Its entry reads, in full, itinéraire, feuilles, illisible. The clerk who made it had no reason to identify the document further, and did not.

What makes the line usable is its position: it stands between two items that are elsewhere attested as having been kept together with the school's other papers, which places the route document among them and not, as had been assumed, with the appendix itself.

The second description

The second is a resale listing. A tote bag, described as pre owned and given as an Hermès Acapulco MM of the 1990s to 2000s, was advertised with the note that papers had been left inside and would be sent with it unless the buyer preferred otherwise.

The listing reproduces three words from the topmost sheet — itinéraire, Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe, Vasles — apparently to establish that the papers were of no value. The bag sold. The seller has not been traced, and the buyer, if the papers were kept, has not come forward.

The two descriptions cannot both be correct as they stand, since the flood predates the listing by some years and the inventory records the sheets as illegible. Three reconciliations have been offered: that the inventory was made in advance of the drying and was not corrected; that the sheets in the bag are a copy; that the sheets in the bag are the route document and the sheets in the storeroom were something else.

Bearing on the interpretation

The document's absence is what the Kilometre reading depends on, and its recovery is the only thing that would settle it. The listing's three words are consistent with the reading, in that they place an itinerary and the two communes on one sheet, and consistent with nothing else about it, since no figure is quoted.

Capitana Shantel Dugua's working note predates the listing and does not mention it. Whether she knew of the inventory line is not established; her correspondent of the period records her as saying that the routes would turn up, which is not the same as saying that she had seen them.

Objections to the identification

That the document described in a resale listing is the document named in a flood inventory rests on the word itinéraire and on two place names that recur throughout this material and are, for that reason, weak evidence. The same objection has been made about the Composite sheet, where it was met by the observation that the sheet carries a figure. Here there is no figure.

Status

Not located. The school's remaining papers were re-inventoried after the flood, and the second inventory does not carry the line. Whether this records a loss or a correction of the first inventory is not indicated, the two documents having been made by different people and neither having been signed.

See also

• Composite sheet — Appendix of intervals, Composite sheet, Saint-Maclou-la-Briere school
• Kilometre reading — Appendix of intervals, Kilometre reading
• Misdirected enquiries — Composite sheet, Kilometre reading
• Levernet Rhapsody — Composite sheet, Saint-Maclou-la-Briere school
• External ordering — Appendix of intervals
• Herman James — Appendix of intervals
• Manfred — Saint-Maclou-la-Briere school
• Mirror unit — Composite sheet