Savoy is both a geographical reference in the narrator’s French travels and the point of departure for the comic journey of the Abbess of Andouillets and Margarita. The novel places it at the edge of a map and along a route, while repeatedly exposing how a traveller’s account can outrun what he has actually seen.

Setting and geographical references

The Abbess of Andouillets is located among the hills dividing Burgundy from Savoy. The boundary gives the abbey’s story a regional setting, and the narrator makes the landscape part of the journey’s frame: the convent’s gardener, serving as muleteer, is said to have accompanied the abbess and Margarita from the confines of Savoy. The place is thus both a mapped region and a point of origin conveyed through someone else’s account.

Savoy also enters the narrator’s reflections on travel routes. Between Calais and Paris, he describes three roads, each promoted by delegates from the towns along it; the route by Lisle and Arras is longer but more instructive, while the road by Amiens offers Chantilly. These competing routes show travel as a choice shaped not only by distance, but by what a traveller expects to see and learn.

Travel, observation, and the making of place

The narrator openly distinguishes between a place and the knowledge claimed about it. He says he knows scarcely more of Calais than what his barber told him, since he landed at dusk and left in darkness, yet argues that he could assemble a long, convincing account by drawing inferences and combining details. The ensuing mock description gives Calais variant names and a population of fourteen thousand, alongside four hundred and twenty families in the lower town, while treating its church’s size as something that can be conjectured from the number of inhabitants. In this mode of travel writing, regional geography and confident description may rest on inference or report rather than direct observation.

That tension also shapes the narrator’s account of movement through France. At each stage, the need to pay for horses and count out three livres and fifteen sous interrupts his attempt to sleep; discrepancies in the fare, the small print of the post-road book, and requests from people along the way keep waking him. Travel is not a smooth passage through scenery but a succession of practical interruptions that govern what can be seen and remembered.

The Savoy journey and its comic details

The abbess’s journey begins because her knee has become stiff after long Matins. She has tried prayers, relics, oils, poultices, herbal remedies, and other treatments before agreeing to travel to the hot baths of Bourbon. Margarita, a novice of about seventeen who has suffered a whitlow after repeatedly sticking her finger into the abbess’s discarded poultices, is chosen as her companion. The preparation is painstakingly material: the old carriage is brought into the sun, its green-frieze lining is darned, yellow binding is sewn back in place, the mules are brought out, and four dozen bells are fitted to their harness.

The gardener-muleteer’s account turns the journey’s origin into a digression of its own. At an inn below a steep Burgundian hill, he settles into wine and conversation, recounting his service at the convent, his friendship with the travellers, and the abbess’s swollen leg. In telling the story, he forgets the abbess, Margarita, and the two mules. The narrator leaves him absorbed in his talk and redirects attention to the animals and their passengers: once the mules have been struck and start up the hill, they continue without the muleteer behind them. Savoy is therefore not given a sustained topographical description; it is made present through a reported departure and the comic separation of talk from movement.

Narrative significance

Savoy’s function is less that of a fully described destination than of a point in the novel’s shifting geography. It anchors the abbess’s illness-and-travel episode, links the convent to Burgundy and the road beyond, and supplies a place-name that the narrator can deploy without pretending to have exhaustively observed it. The contrast between the muleteer’s lively but incomplete tale and the narrator’s exposed methods of assembling descriptions makes travel knowledge itself part of the comedy: routes, fares, maps, hearsay, and inference all compete to determine what a place means on the page.