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The benefit of a combined reading of colonial writings and verbatim records of trial proceedings implying French and indigenous people in Montreal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is to confront those who speak from below with those who speak from above. The litigants think their arguments take on extra tokens of truth, which reveals a cognitive connivance by witnesses, native and French protagonists, as well as the judge and the clerk. Such records point to the ordinariness of commonly accepted attitudes and representations, which contrast with the reactions penned by the authors of missionary accounts, travel diaries and official correspondences. The exercise highlights microsites of intimacy between the French and indigenous people: these experiences, within their everyday life, evoke a well-known normality to people below and an exotic abnormality to people above, in particular regarding the temperaments that are considered disgusting, violent, intemperate and unchecked.