Alsatia, the narrative’s name for Alsace, is less a stable geographical portrait than a passage through which travel, rumor, and invention continually overtake one another. The region links the escape of Diego and Julia with Tristram’s later comic scrutiny of travel itself, making it a setting where movement is vivid but knowledge of place remains uncertain.

Name and Geographical Setting

The embedded tale presents Strasbourg as the great capital of all Alsatia: an imperial city and sovereign state, supposedly garrisoned by five thousand of the world’s best troops. These grand titles do not help a tired traveller get through its gates. Believing admission would cost a ducat, or even a ducat and a half, he turns back toward the inn he has just passed, choosing a bed over an uncertain expense and night outdoors. The inflated civic image and the practical obstacle of entry make Alsatia’s identity at once impressive and inaccessible.

The later account of Diego’s reunion gives Alsatia a more traversable geography. After setting out from the inn, Diego and Fernandez cross the Rhine and travel through Alsace toward Lyons; with Julia, they eventually cross the Pyrenees and reach Valladolid safely. The region is therefore part of a route connecting the Rhine, Lyons, the mountains, and Spain, rather than merely a label attached to Strasbourg.

The Embedded Tale: A Route of Pursuit and Reunion

Fernandez, Julia’s brother, has accompanied her from Valladolid across the Pyrenees and through France in search of Diego. Julia’s journey falters at Lyons: exhausted by the distress of her pursuit, she falls ill and can go no farther. From her bed she writes to Diego and charges her brother not to see her until he has found him and delivered the letter.

Fernandez carries out this commission at the inn. Although the camp-bed is comfortable, he cannot sleep; at daybreak, hearing that Diego is awake, he enters his chamber and gives him Julia’s message. The two men leave on their animals before Diego has completed the verses he has begun. Their haste turns Alsatia into a brief corridor in a much longer journey: they pass the Rhine, traverse the region, head toward Lyons, and return with Julia to Valladolid before the Strasburgers and the abbess of Quedlinburg have even set out on their own cavalcade. The lovers’ reunion is delivered through speed and compressed geography, not an extended stay in the region.

Strasbourg, Curiosity, and the Limits of Travel

The embedded narrative then draws a sharp distinction between Diego’s route and the restless curiosity of the Strasburgers. Once Diego is in Spain, he cannot meet the courteous stranger on the Frankfort road. The townspeople, however, are so strongly driven by curiosity that they spend three days and nights being tossed to and fro along that road before submitting to return home. Their movement has no destination comparable to the lovers’ safe arrival; it is motion produced by collective desire to know.

Tristram’s own account of travel makes that uncertainty a broader comic principle. He admits that he knows little of Calais: he arrived at dusk and left in darkness, and what his barber told him supplies only a sliver of direct observation. Yet he boasts that, by drawing one detail from another, he could compose a long, precise account that might pass for the work of the town clerk. The following description invokes the town’s archives and gives figures for its inhabitants, suburbs, churches, and altars, while also exposing how conjecture and reported information can masquerade as eyewitness authority. Alsatia’s role in the embedded tale belongs to the same unstable world of travel knowledge: routes can be named and crossed, but a confident description does not guarantee genuine familiarity.

Travel as Material Interruption

The book’s French journey also makes movement depend on money and mundane interruptions. On the road, even a traveller determined to sleep is repeatedly awakened by the need to pay at each stage. The exact charge of three livres fifteen sous must be counted out; a missing two sous, a Louis XIV twelve-sous piece that will not pass, or a dispute over whether the fare covers one post or a post and a half can undo the plan to sleep. The small transactions and arguments make travel less a smooth passage across a map than a succession of interruptions that demand attention.

When Tristram enters Lyons, the wreck of his chaise appears at first to offer an escape from these burdens. He calculates that travelling by water to Avignon would carry him 120 miles for less than seven livres, after which he could hire mules or asses to cross the plains of Languedoc cheaply. He imagines saving four hundred livres and gaining pleasure as well as economy. That forward-looking plan is immediately interrupted by a chaise-undertaker, who asks whether the vehicle should be repaired or sold. The episode makes the road’s promise of speed and freedom continually answerable to damaged vehicles, fares, and improvised choices.

Narrative Significance

Alsatia’s significance lies in the contrast between routes that lead somewhere and movement that merely consumes time. Diego and Fernandez cross the region in urgent pursuit of Julia and reach her; the Strasburgers’ curiosity sends them back and forth without a comparable result. In Tristram’s travel narrative, meanwhile, the traveller’s limited sight and the narrator’s capacity to manufacture a seemingly authoritative description unsettle the idea that a place is fully possessed by visiting or writing about it. Alsatia is both a real-seeming passage across a European map and a stage on which the book tests the distance between travel, observation, and knowledge.