Exiled in his back room, a enthusiastic servant attempts to improve his service. His professional conscience quickly becomes an all-consuming obsession. He invents more and more complex and useless methods, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, endlessly seeking control over every stage of his work. Becoming an encyclopaedia without knowing it, this self-taught person believes that by accumulating minute advances, he will be able to successfully create a true "Household Art". Divide madly and rule better. Lessons in total service.

In order to serve people well, it is necessary to know their tastes, to listen to them. In the end, he records their conversations, transcribes them, transforms his cellar into a listening post, and effectively becomes a spy. Such hard work, reconstructing, word by word, the exact score of what he has heard. The central monologue mixes in a single sentence, table remarks, commentaries, fragments of speeches and snatches of dialogues. He summons virtual characters, as supporting proof in a private trial. Reconstructions and tableaux in anamorphosis. To escape from his nightmare, our hero rushes off into the countryside. A race to collect one's wits. A run to swallow up the past.

This script is an accelerated monologue version of the book, Le Colonel des Zouaves, P.O.L, 1997.
Olivier Cadiot, April, 1998