The letter is signed only with a first name: Dominique. Readers won't get any more information about this woman who plunges back into her memories of one fine day in the 1970s. That Wednesday, like every other Wednesday, Dominique went to the newsstand to buy her Charlie Hebdo. Problem: There was only one copy left, and a man wanted it too. So the two of them buy it, share a coffee and read.

Three years later, their daughter Charly was born, followed by their son, whom they wanted to call Hebdo – he would be Hugo. On January 7, 2015, the date of the terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper, Dominique's husband would have turned 60, had he not died of cancer in 2012. As companions in heaven, "you offer him a combi full to bursting with his idols," Dominique writes in this letter sent to the editors of Charlie Hebdo, shortly after the attack. And then the tone becomes heavier. "Please continue, for those who are gone, for Charly and Hugo, for my grandchildren, so that they still believe in freedom, and also a little for me," she concludes.

Charlie Hebdo received tens of thousands of letters like this one after January 7, 2015. Between 56,000 and 70,000, according to estimates by the newspaper's teams. Ten years later, a large part of this "Charlie fund," collected until February 2018, is stored in 146 gray boxes lined up on the shelves of a cold room at the Paris Archives, a location better able to preserve this body of documentation than the weekly's premises.

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