Here is a totally hybrid work of art.  This advert a few minutes long starts with a cartoon and ends with a film in real images.  Besides Odette and Lucette, the star typists of this advert, this film stages two other heroes:  the sprites Charles and Stone. These two practical jokers prove to be directly inspired by the malicious Plick and Plock, the famous elves dreamt up by French cartoonist Georges Colomb, known as Christophe (1856-1945), who was also the father of the  Fenouillard Family. Comics in spite of themselves, the Fenouillards, whose tribulations appeared in newspapers in the form of comic strips from 1893, amused the French a lot who saw in them a caricature of the little bourgeoisie of the provinces.  Also very popular, above all with children, the drawn mischief of the two elves Plick and Plock were published in the newspaper "Le Petit Français illustré" between 1893 and 1904.

But the real star of Le Martyre de la dactylo is none other than the Flambo chair! In 1925, the industrial revolution was spreading throughout France and manufacturers needed new furniture to equip their factories and their offices.  They needed useful, functional tools that allowed the profitability of their employees to be improved.  Frenchman Henri Liber (1890-1970), creator of the Flambo brand, thus decided to develop a chair whose seat and back would be entirely adjustable, to enable you to be well seated and no longer suffer from backache.  The one nicknamed "Mr Flambo" due to one of his brilliant inventions (a lamp that comes on when you turn it over), worried a great deal about the typists lot.  "A typist spends nearly a third of her life on a chair, isn't it fair to give her a little bit of comfort and facilitate her movements by a well adapted chair?", he declared just before creating the famous M42 chair, which guaranteed his company's success.  Patented in 1926 this seat, equipped with a cushion on the back and tipping forward easily, can be used singly or as part of a chain, by being mounted on sliding tracks.  The M42 quickly became the essential company chair of the era.

The original music for this film was composed by Xavier Bussy in 2009.