France occupies two distinct but resonant roles: it is the destination toward which Melisendra and Don Gaiferos flee in Master Pedro’s puppet play, and a country Ricote passes through while seeking a safer future after exile from Spain. The imagined escape ends with lovers on the road to Paris; Ricote’s actual journey makes France a kindly but provisional refuge and a possible route by which his family might eventually be reunited in Germany.

France in the Puppet Play

In Master Pedro’s performance, France is the direction of Melisendra’s longing and the goal of Don Gaiferos’s rescue. The boy interpreter presents Don Gaiferos as roused to action after Charlemagne rebukes him for failing to free his wife. Don Roland offers to accompany him and lend him Durindana, but Don Gaiferos refuses the sword and the assistance, insisting that he can rescue Melisendra alone. The journey begins not as an expedition to France for its own sake, but as a husband’s urgent attempt to reach a captive wife.

Melisendra, held in a tower associated with the alcazar of Saragossa, has repeatedly looked toward the road to France for consolation, thinking of Paris and her husband. After King Marsilio of Saragossa orders punishment for a Moor who kisses her without consent, she sees Don Gaiferos arrive disguised as a traveler. Taking him for a stranger bound for France, she asks him to inquire after her husband. Their recognition turns the direction of her longing into an immediate escape: she descends from the balcony, catches her petticoat on its bars, and is left hanging until Don Gaiferos pulls her down and lifts her onto his horse.

The interpreter sends the pair out of the city toward Paris, blessing their journey and wishing that they reach their longed-for homeland safely. France thus closes the puppet episode as both a geographical destination and the imagined end of captivity: a place where the lovers may live together beyond the reach of their separation. The performance’s briskly happy resolution is undercut by the practical interruption that follows. Once word of the escape reaches King Marsilio, the city raises the alarm, with bells ringing from the mosque towers.

Don Quixote’s Confusion of Performance and Reality

The puppet show makes France part of the boundary between staged events and Don Quixote’s literal response to them. He urges the boy to tell the story plainly rather than wander into elaborate explanation, but his own attention treats the puppets’ adventure as if it were unfolding in the present. When the figures are later broken, he reasons that Melisendra and her husband must already be at least near the French border, since their horse seemed to him to fly rather than gallop. On that basis, he rejects the idea that a damaged puppet could still represent Melisendra: in his understanding, she is already safe with Don Gaiferos in France.

That insistence gives France a precise role in the episode’s comedy. It is not merely a distant place named in a ballad; for Don Quixote, it becomes evidence that the escape has succeeded and that the puppet image must now be false. Master Pedro adjusts the value of the damaged figure, claiming it is one of Melisendra’s attendants instead. The audience’s actual loss is material—the broken puppets must be assessed and paid for—while Don Quixote measures the aftermath against the imagined progress of the lovers’ ride. France marks the point where the fiction seems to continue beyond the stage, even as the damaged props expose the performance’s physical limits.

Ricote’s Journey Through France

Ricote describes France not as a final home but as the first welcoming country in a longer search for security. After leaving his village, he travels there and receives a kind welcome, yet remains eager to see more. He goes on through Italy to Germany, where he believes people may live with greater freedom and where, in many places, conscience is treated with less concern over minor points. He settles in a town near Augsburg. In his account, France is therefore a genuine refuge from immediate hostility, but it is one stage in a continuing movement toward a place he considers more suitable for life.

His experience of welcome is set against the harsher reception he says the exiles encounter elsewhere. Ricote recalls that people in Barbary and other parts of Africa, where they expected help, insult and mistreat them. He also describes the deep attachment that draws many exiles back toward Spain, even when returning means leaving wives and children behind. France’s kind reception matters in this wider comparison, but it does not erase his longing for his native country or resolve the dispersal of his family.

From Germany, Ricote hopes to retrieve treasure buried outside his former town and then find a way to bring his wife, Francisca Ricota, and daughter, Ana Felix, from Algiers to a French port before taking them on to Germany. France is imagined as a usable route between their separation and a hoped-for reunion, not as the ultimate destination. Sancho Panza doubts that the buried money will remain untouched, but Ricote insists that he concealed its location. He offers Sancho two hundred crowns to help recover and hide it, making the plan depend on both a cache left behind in Spain and the possibility of moving his family across the sea.

France as Route and Refuge

Ricote’s plan leaves important uncertainties unresolved. Sancho believes the family may have gone to Barbary because Juan Tiopieyo, his wife’s brother, took them there and went where it was easiest for him to go. Ricote, by contrast, wonders why his wife and daughter chose Barbary rather than France, where they could live as Christians. The exchange presents France as a plausible alternative destination, but not one the family actually reached; their location in Algiers makes the proposed route through a French port a future hope rather than an accomplished return.

The later rescue discussions keep that route in view. When Ana Felix is recognized as Ricote’s daughter in Barcelona, Ricote offers more than two thousand ducats in pearls and gems toward rescuing Don Gaspar Gregorio from Algiers. A renegade proposes sailing back in a small vessel manned by Christian rowers, and Ana Felix says she can answer for him. The immediate plan is a return to Algiers, not a passage through France, but it belongs to the same larger effort to bring separated people out of danger and into a safer life. Across these episodes, France remains significant less as a fully depicted setting than as a destination imagined at moments of flight: the place toward which the puppet lovers ride, the country that welcomed an exile, and the possible passage between a dispersed family and a new home.