Fountains or bridges in medieval romances, ruins or cemeteries in gothic novels, from one end of its history to the other, the novelistic tradition of the Ancien Regime crosses spaces that all act as narrative programs, heralding - with a certain predictability - coming events or actions. Novelistic invention could always draw on this wealth of spatial topoi. This book rediscovers the pertinent spaces that once formed the backdrop for the movements of heroes and characters, but today mostly remain unusable and obsolete. Since its creation in 1986, the Societe d'Analyse de la Topique Romanesque has, in its efforts to assemble a thesaurus of narrative topoi of the French novel from the Middle Ages to the 17th century, often encountered the need for reflection on space in fiction. This volume, the result of a conference at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 2001, is completely devoted to it.