Jesuits

The Jesuits enter the narrative as the custodians of a major library in Lyon, which the travelling narrator hopes to visit for a view of a thirty-volume general history of China written in Chinese characters. Their appearance is brief, but structurally telling: the library embodies a formal, scholarly destination, while the narrator’s changing attention and the Jesuits’ unexpected illness redirect the journey before that destination can be reached.

Identity and Setting

The Jesuits are identified through their college in Lyon and its library, one item in the narrator’s planned itinerary. He places the collection beside Lippius’s celebrated clock as one of the two leading curiosities he intends to see. The planned visit therefore presents the order chiefly through an institution and its holdings, rather than through named members, doctrine, or a described history.

The library’s attraction is pointedly indirect. The narrator admits that he knows little of Chinese, just as he understands little of clockwork, yet both the Chinese books and the mechanism have risen to the top of his list. The mismatch between his limited knowledge and his ambitious itinerary makes the college a destination chosen by fancy as much as by informed study.

The Intended Visit

With time pressing during his stop in Lyon, the narrator sets off for the cathedral to inspect the clock, intending afterward to go to the Jesuits’ college and seek access to the thirty volumes. When he learns that the clock has been out of order for years, its failure does not end the excursion. Instead, he treats its broken condition as a possible subject for description and proceeds toward the library.

By the time he reaches the college, however, his enthusiasm for the Chinese history has ebbed. The closer the prospect of seeing it becomes, the less he desires the visit: his remaining time is short, and his attention is fixed on the Tomb of the Lovers. Thus the library is not simply barred from him by circumstance. It loses its hold over him before the obstacle appears, exposing the instability of an itinerary that had seemed to promise a definite sequence of sights.

Interruption and Comic Reversal

The narrator reaches for the library’s door knocker while wishing that its key might be lost. The wish is immediately overtaken by a report that all the Jesuits have colic, described as an illness of unprecedented severity in the memory of the oldest practitioner. The institution’s collective unavailability supplies the practical reason the proposed visit cannot proceed, while the narration makes the coincidence feel like a comic answer to the narrator’s retreating desire.

The episode’s reversal is compact: the narrator first places the library among the chief objects of his visit, then privately hopes for an excuse not to enter, and finally receives one in the form of the Jesuits’ illness. The college remains a real destination in the itinerary, but it is converted into a missed encounter. No account is given of the library’s contents beyond the proposed Chinese history, or of what becomes of the Jesuits after the interruption.

Narrative Function

The episode makes the difference between a travel plan and the experience of travelling visible. A list can announce clocks, books, churches, and historical sites in a disciplined order; in practice, curiosity cools, time dwindles, and attention gravitates toward another destination. The Jesuits’ library matters less as a source of knowledge than as a point where this movement becomes legible.

The joke also depends on the narrator’s selective presentation. He has already acknowledged that he lacks the expertise to understand either of his first two proposed curiosities, and his desire for the Chinese volumes fades as they come within reach. The report of illness then completes the evasion without requiring him to explain the change of heart. The Jesuits function not as developed characters but as the absent hosts whose illness turns a planned scholarly visit into another detour in a narrative governed by shifting attention.