2015 was a busy year. In the summer I got a small research grant to go to the BNF and the Archives Nationales. The archives are becoming more and more restricted, and so direct access to Zola’s dossiers préparatoires and similar materials are limited to scholars doing comparative editions.

The day I arrived, however, I was also asked to get ready in a hurry to teach a course I had proposed on representations of Paris, largely in the 19th Century, with a brief excursion at the end into 20th century cinema, and modern digital culture. So I was lucky, in that I got to go around, mentally preparing myself for teaching, and gathering materials, and in some cases photographing the actual spaces I wanted to talk about.

Here are some of the first impressions from my stay there. It was a somewhat sleepy and uneventful first day, but I still managed to see some interesting stuff before the lack of sleep made me crash around ten o’clock that night.