In order to examine the relationship between creation and the visible in Zola’s novels and to grasp the complexity of this relationship, we put the window, as an opening onto the world, to the test of the panoramic deployment of this world. “Windows on a panorama” are about the ambivalence of two devices (windows and panorama) caught between distance and immersion, between separation and connection, between “shielding” and “letting see”. Our analysis of three novels—Une page d’amour, La Joie de vivre, La Terre— reveals three ways in which these two devices interact in the novelist’s work: the window that may fade as the panoramic vision overflows it; the window that acts as a shield when the panorama collides with its limits (for example, when confronted with the invisibility of night); and, finally, the window that is affirmed as the site of the creation of a fantasised panorama.