Contemporary testimony in the form of a play, dealing with the second cholera pandemic of which the first Parisian case was attested on March 26, 1832. The work was so successful that the author wrote a sequel (the funeral) the following year.

"Mr. Roch was a painter and playwright: he had not to judge our courage or our weakness, our violence or our resignation; but, by a host of skillfully thrown strokes, he had to accurately reproduce the effect produced by cholera, especially the classes of our shaken society. He succeeded. I even think that the future, always so difficult and so disdainful, will look at the strange page he has sketched, a votive painting that a spiritual and easy talent has just consecrated: Votivâ veluti depicta tabellâ." (Diary of Debates, 29 September 1832)