Atlas of Places

The vast, ever-expanding department store that Octave Mouret builds in central Paris — one of the first of its kind, inspired by Le Bon Marché and the Grands Ma…

A fictional fishing village on the Normandy coast, the setting of La Joie de vivre. The village clings to crumbling chalk cliffs above a violent sea, slowly bei…

The vast wheat plain south of Paris, the setting of La Terre. Flat, fertile, and elemental — Zola's Beauce is the land itself as a force, indifferent to the hum…

The Paris stock exchange — the Palais Brongniart, a neoclassical temple of finance on the Place de la Bourse — is the beating heart of L'Argent. It is here that…

A working-class district of northern Paris, the setting of L'Assommoir. Zola researched it meticulously, walking its streets and visiting its laundries and zinc…

Dr Pascal's sun-drenched estate just outside Plassans, the principal setting of the cycle's final novel, Le Docteur Pascal. The property takes its name from the…

The vast, wild, overgrown garden at the heart of La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret — a reimagining of Eden, where Serge and Albine live outside of time and civilisation…

A tiny, sun-scorched village near Le Paradou in the south of France, where the young Abbé Serge Mouret has been sent as curé in La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret. Les A…

The great central market of Paris — Baltard's magnificent iron-and-glass pavilions, completed in the 1850s and 1860s. The setting of Le Ventre de Paris, represe…

The asylum a few miles outside Plassans where Adélaïde Fouque — Tante Dide, the deranged founding mother of the entire Rougon-Macquart line — has been confined …

A fictional coal-mining town in northern France, based on Anzin and the Valenciennes coalfield. The setting of Germinal — flat, black, dominated by the pit-head…

The fashionable neighbourhood surrounding Parc Monceau in western Paris, the world of La Curée. Here Aristide Saccard builds his extravagant Second Empire mansi…

The heart of the Second Empire and the dominant setting of the cycle. Zola's Paris is a city in violent transformation — Haussmann's great boulevards cutting th…

The iron road of La Bête humaine — the Paris-Saint-Lazare to Le Havre line, its tunnels, level crossings, and snowbound tracks. The railway in this novel is bot…

A fictional provincial town in the south of France, modelled closely on Aix-en-Provence (where Zola grew up). The ancestral home of the Rougon family and the se…

The fortified city on the Meuse where Napoleon III surrendered to the Prussians on 2 September 1870 — the catastrophic defeat that shattered the Second Empire a…

The fictional coalmine at the centre of Germinal — dark, devouring, almost alive. Its name (from Latin vorare, to devour) signals its role as the maw that swall…