Alsace is more than a point on the route: it connects the comic practicalities of travel with the long-delayed reunion in the story of Diego and Julia. Its appearance as Alsatia in a host’s description of a supposedly comfortable bed supplies the clue that ends a pursuit begun in Strasbourg and carried across France.

A Region on the Route

In the travel narrative, Alsace belongs to the shifting geography of a journey whose route and pace are shaped as much by practical obstacles as by the traveler’s plans. The narrator’s account repeatedly exposes the gap between travel writing’s confidence and a traveler’s actual knowledge: he admits that he knows little of Calais, despite being able to compose a seemingly authoritative account, and presents local descriptions as products of inference as well as observation.

The road itself offers alternatives rather than a single effortless line. Between Calais and Paris, the route by Lisle and Arras is longer but more instructive, while another passes by Amiens and Chantilly. Travel is also interrupted by its costs: at each stage, paying for horses and resolving disputes over fares can wake even a traveler determined to sleep. These details give the journey’s geography a material texture of roads, stages, money, and delay.

The Bed at the Inn

Alsace enters the embedded Diego narrative through a traveller’s request for a bed. The innkeeper claims to have one as soft as any in Alsatia, then explains that the stranger who occupied the best bed had been given it because of his nose: Jacinta imagined there would not be room in the camp-bed to turn such a long nose. The traveller’s attention shifts from the bed to the extraordinary nose, and Jacinta confirms its distinction. The traveller recognizes Diego.

The allusion to Alsatia is therefore not an independent travel-guide description of the region. It is part of the innkeeper’s practical explanation, and its significance lies in the sequence of recognition it helps introduce: the nose that made the bed unsuitable becomes unmistakable evidence of the person being sought.

Pursuit and Reunion

The traveller is Fernandez, Julia’s brother, who has accompanied her from Valladolid over the Pyrenees and through France in search of Diego. Julia has been unable to go farther than Lyons. Sick with the distress of the pursuit, she takes to her bed after writing Diego a letter and charging her brother not to see her again until he has found Diego and delivered it.

After recognizing Diego, Fernandez and Diego set out together. They cross the Rhine, traverse Alsace, and make for Lyons; before the Strasburgers and the abbess of Quedlinburg begin their own cavalcade, the men have reached Julia and crossed the Pyrenees with her, returning safely to Valladolid. Alsace is thus one stretch in a larger itinerary, but the route’s movement carries the story from separation toward reunion.

Travel, Knowledge, and Narrative

The region’s two appearances illuminate the novel’s playful uncertainty about travel and description. The narrator mocks the convention of writing an account of every town a traveller passes, and admits that darkness prevented him from properly seeing Calais; elsewhere, the traveller’s route is conveyed through names of roads, rivers, and regions. In the embedded tale, however, geography also organizes pursuit: journeys from Strasbourg through France and across the Rhine lead eventually to the meeting in Lyons and the return to Valladolid.

Alsace consequently serves both as a concrete passage on the map and as a link in a narrative chain. It is named in the comic language of lodging and in the swift report of Diego and Fernandez’s travels, while the difference between those modes—an innkeeper’s local explanation and a storyteller’s compressed itinerary—shows how places acquire meaning through the stories told around them.