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Christophe Martin’s book Espaces du féminin showed how much eighteenth-century French novels depict and fantasize “a rise of female domestic confinement”. Novels which often take place in Paris raise the issue of the representation of female characters in public urban spaces, when in fact gender norms usually locate them in enclosed spaces such as boudoirs and nunneries. Novels, especially in the second half of the 18th century, map out new norms of women’s journeys. Women’s movements were limited, chaperoned and carefully watched over to ward off the dangers facing women, such as the risks of being looked at, talked to, or even assaulted – such risks being associated, as early as mid-eighteenth century, with women’s experience of urban public space.