Avenue Élisée-Reclus is the Paris street where Casaubon’s flight from his pursuers—or from his own fears—takes him to Dr. Wagner’s address, and where he later finds himself again after recounting the Plan. Its name, already encountered in his research, turns an ordinary address into another apparent link in the conspiracy he can no longer set aside.

The Address and the Flight

After leaving the square, Casaubon hurries through Paris and catches a taxi. He gives the driver the destination as number seven, Avenue Élisée-Reclus, hoping to reach Dr. Wagner, who might tell him that he is ill, that he has mistaken ghosts for reality, and that Belbo is alive and the Tres do not exist.

The driver takes a long route through a city still crowded by students and buses, and drops Casaubon at number seven on a lonely street. There is no Dr. Wagner there. Casaubon wonders whether the address might instead be seventeen or twenty-seven, but then recognizes that even finding the right house would not make it reasonable to wake the doctor in the middle of the night. He understands that he has come there as part of the same flight that carried him across Paris, not because he can make the story safe by telling it to someone.

A Name Reabsorbed into the Plan

The street’s name unsettles Casaubon because he remembers encountering Élisée Reclus while reading for the Plan. Reclus wrote about the earth, the underground, and volcanoes; in Casaubon’s increasingly suspicious interpretation, such work makes him one of the people associated with the hidden world beneath ordinary geography. The address therefore does more than fail to lead Casaubon to Wagner: it seems to confirm that the people he is fleeing have spread through Paris and beyond.

This is the location’s decisive narrative turn. Casaubon sought an external explanation that might disprove his fears, but the name on the street instead supplies his paranoid reading with another apparent connection. The city offers no stable division between a practical destination and a clue to the Plan.

Wagner’s Office and the Return

The next morning Casaubon calls Dr. Wagner and, using Garamond’s name to get past the secretary, secures an appointment. Wagner receives him at nine-thirty in an office overlooking the Seine, with the Tower’s shadow visible from the windows. Casaubon tells him the whole story, including what happened on Saint John’s Eve; Wagner listens without interruption and finally tells him that he is mad.

Casaubon leaves without saying goodbye and finds himself once more on Avenue Élisée-Reclus. By then the street marks both his failed nighttime search and the morning’s blunt diagnosis. He collects his belongings and heads to the airport; while waiting, he calls Garamond Press and learns from Gudrun that Diotallevi died on Saturday night. The return to the same avenue thus frames the movement from frantic flight to an attempted confession, without resolving whether Casaubon’s fears can be escaped simply by having them named as madness.