"The 17th sits on the Right Bank like a big crooked wedge of pizza, its nose under the Arc de Triomphe and its crust overlapping the beltway that rims the western edge of the city. In the late 19th century, when Paris was expanding like a soufflé, the far-flung 17th was a getaway for the world-weary. Zola retreated there to write (and gave his heroine Nana, an actress turned rich-man's mistress, a 17th Arrondissement address). Impressionists lived and worked there too, recording the train stations rising to the east, their tracks strewn in fistfuls in the 17th."