French royal post ordinance on changing travel mode

The French royal post ordinance on changing travel mode is a revenue rule that makes a traveler pay for changing his intended mode of transport after setting out from Paris by post. Its practical force appears when Tristram, eager to leave the road and continue by water, is told that his change of plan does not release him from the charge. The episode converts a traveler's preference into a fiscal obligation and makes the ordinance a comic encounter between mobility, official procedure, and the language of choice.

Rule and Scope

The commissioner explains that a traveler who leaves Paris intending to run post to Avignon cannot change that intention or mode of travel without first satisfying the royal post’s contractors for two posts beyond the place where he repents. The ordinance is therefore not simply a charge for a journey actually completed by post: it also imposes a payment for the untraveled distance, protecting the revenue from losses caused by a traveler’s change of mind.

The scene specifies the immediate sum at issue. The commissioner claims six livres and four sous for the next post from the traveler’s present location toward Avignon, because it is a royal post and the horses and postilion are charged at double the ordinary rate. He contrasts this with the three livres and two sous that would otherwise have been due. The regulation’s abstract protection of revenue thus becomes a concrete demand, itemized in money and defended as the consequence of the route and travel mode initially chosen.

The Dispute on the Road

The rule is introduced during Tristram’s journey through France, after his chaise has been damaged and he imagines that the misfortune will let him travel cheaply by water toward Avignon. His projected alternative includes taking the Rhône downstream and continuing across Languedoc by mule or ass. The plan is attractive precisely because it seems to transform an expensive accident into a saving; the royal post-office’s demand interrupts that calculation before he can simply leave the road behind.

A commissary arrives with a written order for payment and says that the charge is due on the king’s behalf. Tristram responds that he owes the king nothing but goodwill and that he does not intend to take post. The commissioner’s answer distinguishes intention from obligation: Tristram may take post if he chooses, but must pay whether he does or not. Tristram’s analogy with adding salt to pickled herring makes the point that permission to do something is not the same as a decision to do it; the commissioner holds to the rule rather than the analogy.

When Tristram says that the demand is contrary to reason and the Gospel, the commissioner produces a printed paper marked Par le Roy. Tristram reads it as requiring a person who sets out from Paris in a post-chaise to continue travelling in one for the rest of his life or pay for it. The commissioner supplies a narrower account of its spirit: a traveler who began with the intention of running post to Avignon must satisfy the contractors for two further posts before changing his intention or mode. The exchange turns on the difference between the ordinance’s stated mechanism and Tristram’s deliberately expansive reading of its consequence.

Revenue, Choice, and Irony

The ordinance treats a change in travel plans as a source of potential loss to the royal post contractors. As the commissioner explains it, the rule prevents the revenues from falling short when a traveler changes course. The required payment makes the choice to abandon post travel costly even when the traveler no longer wishes to use the service. Tristram, by contrast, measures his options through practical calculation: after the chaise breaks, river travel promises to save money and offer a more appealing journey. The rule makes that calculation answerable to an earlier intention rather than to the journey he now wants to take.

The episode’s comedy rests on the gap between ordinary meanings of choice and the official meaning imposed by the regulation. Tristram insists that he does not choose to take post; the commissioner replies that he must pay for it regardless. When the traveler calls the demand unreasonable, the printed royal order ends the argument not by persuading him but by establishing the authority behind the charge. His closing observation that, if fickleness is taxable in France, the best course is to make peace with the country turns the regulation into a joke about the price of changing one’s mind.

The rule also belongs to a wider satire of travel writing and travel itself. Elsewhere on the same journey, Tristram dwells on the small repeated payments at each stage, which disrupt even the most determined attempt to sleep: the traveler must count out three livres and fifteen sous, manage shortfalls and disputed coins, and consult the small print in a book of post-roads. The ordinance’s demand extends that comic friction from the stage-by-stage payment to the larger decision about how to travel. Movement promises freedom and change, but the practical machinery of travel repeatedly interrupts it with costs, accounts, and rules.

Narrative Significance

The ordinance is presented through an encounter rather than as detached legal exposition. Its printed notice, the commissioner’s explanation, and the competing meanings Tristram assigns to the word choice make the rule legible in action. The reader sees both the financial terms and their effect on a traveler who believed a change of transport could follow from a change of circumstances.

The episode does not report the ordinance being repealed or the charge being waived. Instead, its immediate narrative consequence is the exposure of a constraint: Tristram may prefer water travel, but the post system claims payment because he began with a different intention. That tension sharpens the book’s recurring contrast between motion as a source of pleasure and the procedures that regulate it. Here, the road is not merely a route; it is also an account that follows the traveler after he tries to leave it.