Geógraphie de Balzac. Portrait impressionniste de la France ?

This paper offers a cartography of the geography of Balzac's France. The corpus comes from Hoffman's (1968) geographical repertoire. Balzac's geography depends on its era and highlights the diversity of places the author visited. The author's opus is primarily Parisian and after, for the most part, it spans the northwest half of France. His territories are sharply fragmented, refl ecting his realist aesthetics that are characterised by modest spatial spheres at the level of geographic milieux. Such fragmentation is his response to the literary depictions of "social types". The chorematic sketch sheds light on how French space was organised during the first half of the 19th century.