This fascination with narrative, often with cinematic accents, has not only led American microhistorians far from the engagements with social science described above, it has also generated two important critiques of the genre. First, it has been charged, microhistorians have let their desire to tell a good story trump serious engagement with the problematic nature of their source material. In most cases, this material was compiled by legal authorities – both secular and religious – who followed particular, formulaic textual conventions, recorded evidence in accordance with rigid rules of procedure, and even altered the original language of testimony (for instance, the Inquisition translated Montaillou villagers' Occitan into Latin, which Le Roy Ladurie then rendered into French). In a critique of Brucker's Giovanni and Lusanna, Thomas Kuehn suggested that microhistorians, eager to see themselves as anthropologists working with native informants, “have … broadly assumed the transparency of their narrative representations.” Yet Brucker's trial records, Kuehn pointed out, contained not one, single, transparent story, but two conflicting ones, recounted by the competing parties in the formulaic language of the law. They offered no certain way of piercing through the narrative veil to grasp a true, underlying reality. Robert Darnton's mesmerizing account of the “Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” which he based on a fictionalized, formulaic memoir written years after the fact, has received similar criticism.