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The Brownian sphere is a random metric space, homeomorphic to the two-dimensional sphere, which arises as the universal scaling limit of many types of random planar maps. The direct construction of the Brownian sphere is via a continuous analogue of the Cori--Vauquelin--Schaeffer (CVS) bijection. The CVS bijection maps labeled trees to planar maps, and the continuous version maps Aldous' continuum random tree with Brownian labels (the Brownian snake) to the Brownian sphere. In this work, we describe the inverse of the continuous CVS bijection, by constructing the Brownian snake as a measurable function of the Brownian sphere. Special care is needed to work with the orientation of the Brownian sphere.

We prove that large Boltzmann stable planar maps of index $\alpha \in (1;2)$ converge in the scaling limit towards a random compact metric space $\mathcal{S}_{\alpha}$ that we construct explicitly. They form a one-parameter family of random continuous spaces ``with holes'' or ``faces'' different from the Brownian sphere. In the so-called dilute phase $\alpha \in [3/2;2)$, the topology of $\mathcal{S}_{\alpha}$ is that of the Sierpinski carpet, while in the dense phase $\alpha \in (1;3/2)$ the ``faces'' of $\mathcal{S}_{\alpha}$ may touch each-others. En route, we prove various geometric properties of these objects concerning their faces or the behavior of geodesics., Comment: 186 pages, 47 figures. Comments are welcome!