Michel Dave learned the shoemaking trade but never practiced it. He joined the La Pommeraie workshop at the age of 50. His world is a succession of words in perpetual evolution and transformation; he begins with a word in the upper left corner of the page. Aided by a dictionary he never leaves behind, he tirelessly explores expressions based on the opening lines of sentences. Like a taxonomist, he compiles a kind of encyclopedia of his universe, governed by words and their interactions.