Mapped
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo
Hugo's Paris is the heart of the book, and he maps it street by street: the Gorbeau tenement on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, the Luxembourg where Marius and Cosette fall in love, the convent of Petit-Picpus, the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie by Les Halles, and the sewers Valjean carries the wounded Marius through. The story reaches it from far off, though: from Digne in the Alps, from Montreuil-sur-Mer in the north, from the battlefield of Waterloo.
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Notre-Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo
A novel written to save a building, and it worked. Hugo's Paris of 1482 is rebuilt street by street around the cathedral on the Île de la Cité, and every place the story turns on is real: the Place de Grève where Esmeralda dances, the Palais de Justice, the thieves' Cour des Miracles, the Bastille, the gibbet at Montfaucon. The cathedral itself has burned and been rebuilt since he wrote it.
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo
In the Paris of 1482, the deformed bellringer Quasimodo, the archdeacon Frollo consumed by his desire for the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, and the cathedral itself are bound together in a tragedy of love, cruelty and sanctuary. Hugo's Paris is a real medieval city rendered in vast detail: Notre-Dame above all, the Place de Grève with its pillory and gibbet, the thieves' Court of Miracles, and the Montfaucon gallows where the story ends.
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