Burgundy enters the French journey as more than a point on a map: its steep hills shape a roadside temptation, and its wine makes travel’s bodily habits more compelling than its planned route. Elsewhere it lies between Burgundy and Savoy in the narrator’s account of the Abbess of Andouillets’ convent, while the family’s passage through France turns the region into part of a travel narrative that resists conventional guidebook certainty.

Setting and Routes

Burgundy is named as the region separating the hills in which the convent of Andouillets is situated from Savoy. The location places the abbess’s journey to the Hot Baths of Bourbon within a recognizable provincial geography, although the narrator’s attention soon shifts from map-based orientation to the practical comedy of getting on the road.

The region also belongs to the choices confronting a hurried traveler between Calais and Paris. One of the three competing roads runs by Lisle and Arras; it is the longer route, but the narrator calls it the most interesting and instructive. The deputies of towns along the alternatives have enough to say in favor of their respective roads that choosing among them can consume half a day. Burgundy’s place in the wider French itinerary is thus framed by the friction between routes advertised as useful and the time spent deciding how to travel.

Wine, Hillside, and Habit

The journey associated with the abbess supplies Burgundy with a more immediate presence. The muleteer has mortgaged a month of his convent wages for a leather wine-cask, which he hides behind the old carriage beneath a russet riding-coat. Because the weather is hot and he walks far more than he rides, he repeatedly falls behind the carriage to drink; before half the journey is complete, the wine has leaked away through the cask’s ordinary opening.

At a steep Burgundian hill, the day’s heat, the pleasant evening, the wine, and a little bush above the door of a cool cottage combine into an invitation the muleteer cannot resist. He lashes the mules, looks toward the abbess and Margarita as if announcing his presence, gives the animals a second crack to send them onward, and slips behind the carriage into the inn. The episode makes the landscape an active part of the action: the slope and cottage interrupt the party’s progress, while the wine turns an assigned servant into a creature of appetite and habit.

Travel, Observation, and Invention

The narrator repeatedly exposes the gap between travel and knowledge. He admits that he knows almost nothing of Calais: he arrived at dusk and left in darkness, learning only a little from his barber. Yet he claims he could assemble a long, detailed chapter about the town by connecting scraps of information and inference, writing with the apparent authority of its town clerk. The imagined account makes guidebook confidence look less like direct observation than a skill at arranging what little is known.

That tension extends to the burdens of movement itself. A traveler who hopes to sleep through a fine country on excellent roads in an easy carriage is repeatedly roused to pay for horses at each stage. The precise charge of three livres fifteen sous must be counted out, and apparent preparations for uninterrupted sleep are undone by short payments, disputed coins, forgotten balances, and the need to consult the tiny print of the post-road book. The route is not experienced as a smooth passage through scenery but as a succession of transactions that force the traveler awake.

The French journey is also shaped by the narrator’s preference for motion and improvisation over an orderly travel plan. As he enters Lyons, he welcomes the broken condition of his chaise because it seems to offer a cheaper and more pleasurable way onward: a hundred and twenty miles by water to Avignon for less than seven livres, followed by a crossing of the plains of Languedoc on mules or asses. His imagined passage down the Rhône, with the scenery and vineyards flashing by, turns a mishap into an anticipated gain. Burgundy’s hillside episode belongs to the same comic geography, where roads, vehicles, costs, appetites, and detours continually redirect the meaning of travel.