The portrayal of modern Paris that Modiano delineates in his novels continuously preserves the filthy residues of History, in an imagined urban geography saturated with figurative modalities of the earth-whether it be decaying soils, quicksand, or muddy swamps which threaten to immerse the narrators. Exploiting a geological terminology, Modiano approaches Paris as a land covered with several deposits of oblivion. The city has a corrupt, immoral, fraudulent deepness that his protagonists seek to excavate and delve into, with a sense of malaise and alienation that topographical scrupulousness appears to momentarily alleviate. Modiano develops a terrestrial relationship with the past: time has a telluric depth, and the present and past collapse into a single hermeneutic entity. A hidden cartography, based on the Paris of the Occupation, remains unperceptively dormant under the geography of the present-day city. It will be shown that in Modiano's narrative universe, such an obscure episode of History left palpable remnants on the surface of the everyday, in the manner of a haunting sediment that lingers as an essential foundation of the present time.