Lo que transmitió

There is what is handed down through papers, and what is handed down without anyone noticing. Among the Mahys as among the De Rijcks, two generations later, the same gestures recur: go and see for yourself, take notes, sort, keep.

First the love of our countryside, of a tiny country in which he insisted it was still possible to get lost. Then the love of Brussels, whose history he shared week after week, and of the whole of Belgium, its nine provinces travelled like a continent.

The passion for archiving too: annotated maps, completed dossiers, coloured pens, documentation patiently built over decades. Carl inherited that compulsion to keep everything, down to this very site where the family's clippings, photographs and films are catalogued one by one.

And finally the taste for media, that of a man who knew a route is only worth something if it is shared, and who found in radio and then television the right form for doing so. Plus the taste for travel, from Panama to Colombia, from the Black Sea to Cyrenaica, always with the same conviction: the finest discoveries are often fifteen kilometres from home.

Fuentes: Archives familiales · Carl De Moncharline