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This article examines the representation of the reading practices that underlie archaeological investigation in 19th Century narrative fiction. By reintegrating the writing of things into the space of the book, literary Pompeii-mania seems to call into question the primacy of the material vestige over the written word, which founds archeology as a scientific discipline. However, it only leads reading to confronting with the desire to embrace an imprint. In these fictions, Pompeii is an archaeological site full of fantasies and hallucinations, which allows literature to articulate knowledge of the material past and the deciphering of the human psyche around the same vestige object. This reflection on the legibility of archaeological traces thus aims at sheding light on the literary antecedents of the archaeological metaphor that is dear to Sigmund Freud.