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Charles Sorel’s Anti-roman depicts the comic mystification of Lysis, the “berger extravagant”, by some of his friends. The latter make him believe that they have taken him to the Forests, a French region that is also the setting of the very famous Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée, whereas they are in Brie. The prank is built on the substitution of toponyms. This study wishes to show that the madness of Lysis, his extravagance, also consists in a form of disorientation coming from an overly abstract conception of the map, for which the responsibility lies above all with the novelistic writing, full of common places. The epistemological denunciation is inseparable from the aesthetic criticism: against disorientation, a language and a topography of the particular are needed.