This article studies the archives of Paul Bataillard (1816-1894), composed of documents on the history of the Bohemians in Europe and traces from his meetings with the Manush people of Paris between the 1840s and 1880s. These materials are analyzed as ethnographic sources that document the diversity and social evolutions of the Manush milieu in Paris. The content of these archives provides access to the conditions of a field survey and shows the milestones of an analysis dedicated to a social morphology of the Romani worlds in France in the second half of the nineteenth century.