This article examines Hardy’s Journal by focusing on the practices surrounding its creation, particularly with regard to how temporality is expressed in the section describing the death of Louis XV. Here, despite the text’s fragmentary nature, the narrative proves virtually unbroken. Furthermore, this section provides clusters of facts obtained either through the use of perspective or by altering the chronology of events in certain passages. This tempers the sense of immediacy created by the use of dates and confirms the desire to undertake a historical study, a desire that the work’s largely retrospective lens also helps reveal. However, the limits of this endeavour are clear : in the course of his work, the diarist remains primarily focused on the present moment, rather than pursuing historical synthesis.