Balzac wrote The Human Comedy when the first railway networks were forming across Europe. Just as Balzac hoped to remedy the “lack of connectedness” in the novel by having his characters reappear periodically, the new modes of transportation were conceived as a way to correct geological accidents, to decompartmentalize the world, and thus to invent a world-wide consciousness. From a confrontation of the oratorical practice of such great figures of nineteenth-century liberalism as Lamartine and Renan and composition techniques used by Balzac, Proust, or Jules Romains in their fictions, one may argue that novelistic cycles produce in the readers’ minds a feeling of “internal distance” with reconfiguring consequences and that this specific aesthetic effect is a way of making sense of the new complexity of a world in which one can no longer conceive of “here” in isolation from a “there”– i.e. from elsewhere.