ABSTRACT
Michel Butor, besides being one of the key early figures of the Nouveau Roman, was a keen traveller who enjoyed the privilege of free rail travel granted to family members of SNCF employees in France. For his third novel, La modification, he chose a train journey to measure the distance between two cities, Paris and Rome, through the narration of the protagonist's relationship with two women: his wife in Paris and his mistress in Rome. The movement of the train is not viewed from the outside, it is not simply observed like that of the neighbouring train, but the stress is, once more, put onto the protagonist's and the reader's own body. Butor's choice of the train journey for La modification can be seen as a direct application of the novel as travel, yet his essay introduces another travelling dimension: it establishes a link between the place of reading and the place where the story takes.
