Fernando del Paso (Premio Cervantes 2015) wrote a great historical novel about one of the crucial moments in the history of Mexico: the French intervention of 1862. His work as a “total novel”/an epic novel, which seeks to exhaust all its narrative possibilities (structures, references, stylistic resources), presents an extraordinary handling of documentary references and literary intertexts, called for our study “archives”. It is the trace of other authors, or of other writings, or of another kind of cultural reference, that is able to evoke, remit, transfer, transform or expand an idea, a character, an action, a scene.