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Victor Hugo, he too writing around 1860, was painfully conscious of the changes to Paris. In writing Les Miserables he recognises that he will have to deal with the problem of describing the old Paris to an audience of readers in the new 'eventre' or gutted Paris of the 1860s. Indeed the cartograpical detail he likes to dwell on is ostentatiously complex: (this is, after all, VH!): his detail is nostalgia-driven, comparable in its intensity to Dickens, (the Dickens, for example, who describes his excursions into the underworld of the St. Giles rookeries in the company of Inspector Field): Hugo writes

"the Rue Polonceau ended here…the petite Rue Picpus passed beyond, rising towards the Marche Lenoir. He who, coming from the Seine, reached the extremity of the Rue Polonceau, had at his left, the rue Droit Mur" etc. at great length. The fact that some of the tortuous alleys (for him so full of the footsteps and voices of Vautrin, Cosette, Valjean) had simply been razed away must have been particularly painful to him.

No-one understood so well the almost organic complexity and plurality of the city. Sociologically, it is true, Balzac's Paris is far more detailed. But Hugo's vision of the modern city was the more intense. He was the first to explore its three layered nature: street level of course; but also aerial and the subterranean. In an astonishing description in book 13, Part 2 of the 1830 insurrection from the air he writes:

"The eye which might have looked from above onto that mass of shade would have caught a glimpse here and there perhaps, from point to point, of indistinct lights, bringing out broken and fantastic lines, outlines of singular constructions, something like ghostly gleams, coming and going among the ruins; these were the barricades. The rest was a lake of obscurity, misty, heavy, funereal, above which rose motionless and dismal silhouettes: the Tour St Jacques, the church St Mery, and two or three others of those great buildings of which man makes giants and of which night makes phantoms." (Hugo was writing at a time when the balloon and the camera were coming together in the aerial photography of Nadar).

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