This research note attempts to show that the landscape of the Laurentian Valley in the XVIIIth century was complex and varied. Organization of seigneurial space reveals major disparities, explainable by the interplay of diverse factors at different levels. Use of a single uniform mode of documentation, such as the « aveux et denombrements » of the French regime, could be an important avenue of research for discovering the phenomena which influenced the formation of the rural landscape.