Avignon is a way station between river journey and road travel in Tristram Shandy’s passage through southern France, but it is more than a point on the route. Here a blown hat becomes a question about local climate, a guarded mule ride turns the traveler’s breeches into comic contraband, and the pursuit of Death continues even as the pace of travel slows. The city’s brief appearance concentrates the book’s larger interest in how accident, hearsay, and narration shape what a traveler thinks he knows.

Setting and Arrival

After leaving the supposed tomb of the lovers, the traveler reaches a boat in time to save his passage. Before he has sailed a hundred yards, the Rhône and Saône meet and carry him downstream. The narrator immediately complicates that sequence by observing that he had described this voyage before making it: the account’s order on the page does not simply reproduce the order of experience.

At Avignon, he says, there is little to detain him beyond the old house in which the duke of Ormond resided and a short remark about the place. He moves briskly from the city toward the next stage of the journey, announcing that in a few minutes he will be crossing the bridge on a mule. The speed of that transition makes Avignon a narrative threshold: a place to pause just long enough for an anecdote and an observation, then to set out again.

The Mule, the Breeches, and the Road

The crossing is a small traveling party in motion. The narrator rides a mule; François follows on a horse carrying the portmanteau; and the owner of both animals strides ahead with a long gun on his shoulder and a sword under his arm. The man’s precaution, the narrator jokes, is against the possibility that the travelers might run off with his cattle. The supposed threat is answered not with indignation but with amused generosity: the narrator says he took the man’s vigilance kindly and intended to give him his breeches at the end of the journey, in return for the trouble they had caused him.

That joke ties the traveler’s clothing to the practical arrangements of the journey. The breeches make the owner’s armed escort seem less absurd from the narrator’s point of view, while the offer to give them away turns the inconvenience into a comic debt. A moment later, the narrator asks a man standing idle at the inn door to hold his mule while he pulls off a jack-boot hurting his heel. He has assumed the man is connected with the house or stable, but when he turns back to take the mule and thank him, he discovers that Monsieur le Marquis has gone inside. The interrupted exchange leaves the traveler’s mistaken assumption hanging as another small uncertainty in the scene.

Wind, Reputation, and Evidence

The narrator’s remark on Avignon begins with a methodological caution. He objects to deciding, from the chance that a man’s hat was blown off on his first night in the city, that Avignon is windier than every other town in France. He did not initially treat the accident as proof. Only after asking the innkeeper, who answered seriously, and hearing that the city’s windiness was proverbial in the surrounding country did he record the claim.

Even then, he presents the observation as a question to the learned about the cause, not as an explanation he can supply. His joke about Avignon’s many dukes, marquises, and counts ends with the assertion that there is scarcely any talking to them on a windy day. The remark shifts from a traveler’s attempt to test a local report into social comedy: the city’s reputation for wind becomes the occasion for a quip about its titled inhabitants. Avignon is thus observed through several kinds of evidence at once—chance experience, an innkeeper’s testimony, regional proverb, and the narrator’s own comic inference—without those kinds being treated as interchangeable.

Departure and Narrative Significance

From Avignon, the traveler has the whole south of France between the Rhône and Garonne to cross by mule, at his own leisure. He says he has left Death far behind, yet personifies Death as a pursuer who has followed many people through France and never at such a mettlesome pace. The pursuit continues, but the pursuer seems to lag without hope; the narrator, for his part, asks why he should flee so fast. The chase makes the change in pace more than a practical choice: after a precipitate and rattling journey, he changes his mode of travel and imagines crossing the rich plains of Languedoc as slowly as a foot can fall.

The new pace also supports a joke about travel writing. A large, rich plain may delight the traveler, the narrator says, but it gives travel writers little to do after they have called it delicious or delightful, praised its soil, and described nature’s abundance. Their difficulty is that the plain offers little variety to describe before it carries them to another town, and then perhaps only to another plain. Avignon stands at the hinge of this transition: the narrator passes through it amid practical mishaps and a local inquiry, then turns toward a slower journey that both resists and mocks the conventional travel account.