Images that stimulate our imagination

People in charge of the excellent Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France [access] send us constantly all kinds of fascinating images, which I receive through their Twitter messages. Here's a typical specimen, which reached me just a few minutes ago.

The nice thing about such Gallica images is that, in general, they're rarely accompanied by any kind of possibly boring explanations: neither a description of the subject, nor the date and place of the image. So, our imagination is free to wander.

I look upon these Gallica images as a kind of antidote to an excessive consumption of Google. As everybody knows, Google seeks (particularly through Wikipedia) to tell us everything that can possibly be known about anything whatsoever. That's great, of course. I would be totally lost, today, without the miraculous assistance of Google and Wikipedia. But it's good, at times, to know almost nothing about such-and-such a Gallica image. And to be reassured that there's probably no way in the world that you could ever acquire much more factual data concerning the image in question. Consequently, you're obliged to invent your own data...

Maybe there are readers of my Antipodes blog who might be able to tell us what this fellow is doing. And when, where and why...

Personally, I have the impression that this well-dressed guy is an employee of an international company that sells livestock through the Internet. Clearly, he's delivering this beast (Is it a camel or a dromedary?) to one of their customers, maybe in Marseille.