Abbey of Saint Germain

The Abbey of Saint Germain, visited during the journey through France, turns a sightseeing excursion into a compact comedy of mistaken identity. Its tombs invite solemn curiosity, but the visitors’ expectations collide with the sacristan’s account: a celebrated prince proves to have been a monk, and the woman associated with one tomb is confused with a male saint.

The Visit

While dinner is being prepared, Walter Shandy proposes a visit to the abbey to see the bodies recommended by Monsieur Sequier. Toby Shandy agrees readily, saying he will go to see any body. Walter objects that the bodies are mummies, but Toby answers that this means they need not shave. Walter counters that they should go with their beards on, as if visiting relations. Corporal Trim lends his master an arm, and the three set out for the abbey.

The exchange establishes the visit’s comic register before the party reaches the tombs: a religious and antiquarian outing is filtered through practical jokes about shaving, beards, and family resemblance. The abbey is a destination within the travel narrative, but the scene’s attention quickly shifts from its architecture to the stories attached to its dead.

Tombs and Misrecognition

A young Benedictine sacristan, carrying a torch kept ready in the vestry, leads the visitors into the tomb of Saint Heribald. He describes Heribald as a renowned prince of the house of Bavaria, influential under Charlemagne, Louis le Debonnair, and Charles the Bald, and as a leading figure in bringing order and discipline to government. Toby infers that such a prominent statesman must also have been a gallant soldier. The sacristan corrects him: Heribald was a monk.

The correction lands more heavily on Toby and Trim than on Walter. They seek consolation in one another’s faces but find none, while Walter puts both hands on his codpiece, his habitual gesture when something greatly amuses him. He is especially pleased because he hates monks; their disappointment gives him a relative triumph and puts him in high spirits. The abbey’s sacred history thus becomes a small contest in which the same information produces distinct reactions: Toby’s military assumptions are overturned, Trim shares his master’s letdown, and Walter enjoys the reversal.

Walter then asks, sportingly, about another tomb. The sacristan says that it contains the bones of Saint Maxima, who came from Ravenna to touch the body. Walter interrupts by calling the saint Saint Maximus and declaring him one of the greatest saints in the martyrology. The sacristan corrects the confusion: Saint Maxima came to touch the bones of Saint Germain, the abbey’s builder. Toby asks what she gained from the act; Walter replies with a generalizing joke about what any woman gets from it. The sacristan gives the answer as martyrdom, bowing to the ground.

The Abbey in the Travel Narrative

The episode is framed as a short thread drawn out of the mystery of Walter’s stay at Auxerre, then woven in and concluded. Its compact form suits the scene: a proposed excursion, a torchlit approach to the tombs, and successive corrections are enough to turn the visit into a self-contained comic interruption within the larger journey.

The abbey’s importance here lies less in a description of its buildings than in the encounters staged among its tombs. The sacristan speaks with the authority of the place’s religious history; Toby interprets that history through military experience; Walter redirects it into mockery; and Trim shares Toby’s wordless disappointment. The resulting gap between reverent expectation and comic misunderstanding makes the abbey a setting where names, reputations, and assumptions are repeatedly unsettled.