The Pays de la Loire region is home to many of the places that inspired Émile Zola or Balzac. Zola settled in Piriac-sur-Mer in 1876, when he arrived accompanied by his friend the editor Charpentier and their respective wives.
Balzac wrote that “the Breton land has race, character, history, movement, and beliefs. The spirit can almost always be found in the seaside towns. The Grotte à Madame, near the Castelli point, seems to be his favorite, and will play a leading role in the story of the Conch Shells of Monsieur Chabre. In his novel Beatrix Cevallos, Balzac describes the town as a charming corner at the end of the world that is reminiscent of Provence, where women are dressed in voluminous petticoats...”, Zola would be inspired to create a fiction in which his fascination with an unexplored and exotic backwater emerges in the eyes of a bohemian. Chateaubriant described Piriac as a "small old and rustic town, with dark streets, narrow in the manner of Algerian streets, crowded with manure, geese, oxen, pigs." He lived with his family on the Quai de Verdun, in the Hôtel des Bains, today the Brasserie La Vigie. Daudet wrote: "The church raises its bells near the waves... Last limit of this corner of land, the cemetery has bent crosses, crazy weeds, and a battered low wall where stone benches rest... One cannot, certainly, find a place more delicious, more secluded than this town lost among the rocks, both rural and marine." The author later moved to neighboring Brière and soaked up the native landscape, ways of life, and vocabulary to write his famous novel, Les courses de Guérande. The novel was published in 1874 and has since become one of France's most famous works of literature.