the post-chaise

The post-chaise is Tristram’s vehicle for travelling through France, but it never remains a merely practical means of transport. Its breakdown seems to open a faster, cheaper route down the Rhône; its repairs repeatedly hold up progress; and its sale takes the narrator’s French remarks with it. Through those reversals, the chaise links the material uncertainties of travel to the unstable act of recording and interpreting experience.

Journey and apparent opportunity

As Tristram walks into Lyon, his baggage is jumbled in a cart moving ahead of him, and the post-chaise lies wrecked. He immediately recasts the misfortune as an advantage: from Lyon, he can go by water to Avignon for a hundred and twenty miles at a cost of seven livres, then cross the plains of Languedoc on mules or asses. He calculates a clear saving of four hundred livres and imagines the pleasure of travelling down the Rhône past Vienne, Valence, and Viviers, with the landscapes and vineyards along the way renewing his spirits.

That plan is as much an act of imagination as a travel calculation. As Tristram dwells on the river journey he might take, the wrecked chaise seems to diminish in his estimation, until he is prepared to part with it. A chaise-undertaker offers to refit it, then asks whether Tristram will sell. Tristram agrees, naming the ironwork and glasses as worth forty livres each and offering the leather as well. What first seemed a fortunate release from an inconvenient vehicle thus becomes a transaction whose consequences outlast the immediate change of transport.

The vehicle as a source of delay

The journey’s ordinary frustrations make the post-chaise’s dependability an ongoing question. Tristram complains that repeated payments at each stage defeat the traveller’s attempt to sleep: the exact fare must be counted out, small sums may be missing, and a discrepancy over whether the charge covers one post or a post and a half forces him to consult the fine print in his road book. Even when he has prepared the money in advance, disputed change and other interruptions wake him. Travel by chaise promises forward motion, but its routine demands repeatedly interrupt that motion.

Mechanical trouble supplies another recurring brake. Tristram describes a French postilion having to get down almost as soon as the vehicle leaves town, because a rope has broken, a knot slipped, a staple drawn, a bolt needs adjustment, or some small strap or buckle requires attention. Instead of condemning the chaise or its driver, Tristram says he takes such failures calmly and accepts the good and bad encountered on the road. His composure has a practical edge: he jingles a twenty-four-sous coin against the glass, and the postilion, who has stopped for black bread, resumes the journey at a leisurely pace. They enter Montreuil only after the meal is finished.

Even haste cannot make the vehicle answer to the traveller’s wishes. Tristram observes that when a man’s wishes race far ahead of the carriage, disappointment falls on the vehicle and its equipment as well as on the traveller. At first, he limits his blame to the particular post-boy involved; after the same trouble recurs, the sequence of separate complaints itself becomes part of the joke. The chaise is not simply an obstacle: its pace and condition make visible the mismatch between the traveller’s urgency and the material conditions of getting anywhere.

Fares, regulations, and travel choices

The vehicle also places Tristram within a system of stages, fares, and rules that can make a change of plan expensive. When a post-office commissary requires six livres and four sous, Tristram challenges the treatment of a defenceless stranger. The commissary explains that a traveller who sets out from Paris intending to travel by post towards Avignon cannot change his mode without paying the contractors for two further posts beyond the place where he changes his mind. The rule is meant to protect revenue from losses caused by changing one’s mind. Tristram draws out the implication with bitter humour: in France, even fickleness is taxable.

This restriction sharpens the contrast between the imagined liberty of travel and its actual administration. Tristram may picture abandoning the chaise for a river journey or another means of crossing the country, but the financial terms of the post system make such a change consequential. The post-chaise is therefore both transport and commitment: once the journey begins under a particular arrangement, departure from it can carry a cost beyond the price already paid.

Sale, lost notes, and narrative consequences

After selling the chaise, Tristram discovers that his remarks on France were still in its pocket. In his account, the sale has therefore disposed of both vehicle and manuscript: notes he valued at four hundred guineas have gone with the chaise for four Louis d’or, while the buyer has also received a vehicle Tristram reckons worth six. The loss becomes more galling because the purchaser is a chaise-undertaker, rather than a bookseller to whom Tristram thinks he could have sold the notes on better terms.

Tristram goes to look for the buyer, accompanied by his valet de place, but finds the house and shop shut. His account specifies that it is the eighth of September, the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. The episode does not restore either the post-chaise or the notes. Instead, the vehicle’s material passage out of Tristram’s possession carries away part of the record he had made of his journey, turning a travel mishap into a loss of narrative material.

The post-chaise and the travel narrative

The episodes associated with the post-chaise make travel knowledge uncertain in ways that extend beyond mechanical failure. Tristram describes the difficulty of choosing among three roads between Calais and Paris, each promoted by representatives of towns along the route. He also admits that he saw almost nothing of Calais: he arrived at dusk and left in darkness, yet could still imagine writing a long, authoritative chapter about the town by combining fragments and inference. The distinction between what a traveller has witnessed and what he can make a convincing account of becomes central to the journey’s humour.

The chaise’s stops, charges, repairs, and eventual sale repeatedly interrupt the expectation that travel will produce a clear, orderly record. Tristram’s descriptions of the French post system and the road itself are shaped by precisely these interruptions. The vehicle carries him onward, but it also creates the delays and transactions through which the journey acquires its narrative form; when it disappears, it takes the travel notes with it. The post-chaise thus embodies the book’s persistent tension between movement and digression, experience and its telling.