Where It All Goes Down
Peaceful Countryside and Swanky Paris
The opening of this book gives us a pretty good idea of what kind of setting we're dealing with. Verrières is a little town whose "white houses with their sharp-pointed roofs of red tile stretch down a hillside, every faint ripple in the long slope marked by thick clusters of chestnut trees" (1.1.1). It all sounds pretty nice, except for the part about rich people building huge walls to protect their land from all the filthy peasants.
The French countryside is a fairly simply place, so it gets fairly peaceful descriptions. When Julien goes to Paris, though, he encounters an urban world that's much more complicated. As the narrator tells us,
That evening, at the ball, he was struck by the magnificence of the de Retz mansion. The entranceway courtyard was roofed over by a huge, crimson-colored canvas awning, dotted with golden stars. (2.8.22)
The description continues, but you can get from this part alone that Julien is no longer living among the peaceful streams and singing birds of his youth. He's in the big leagues now, where value isn't measured by natural beauty, but by the cost of expensive decorations.