Mule

The mule in Tristram Shandy is more than a means of transport: it repeatedly sets its own pace, declines the routes imposed on it, and turns travel into an encounter with bodies, animals, and chance. From the abbess of Andouillets’s balking pair to the mule that carries Diego through a story of disputed identity and reunion, these animals resist being reduced to equipment. Their stubbornness redirects the action; their movement, whether halted or unhurried, gives the narrative room to stray.

Work, preparation, and refusal

When the abbess of Andouillets prepares to travel to the Hot Baths of Bourbon for her stiff knee, the convent mobilizes around the journey. An old calesh is brought into the sun and lined with green frieze; the gardener is appointed muleteer; two old mules are led out while their tails are clipped. Lay-sisters darn the lining and sew on yellow binding, the under-gardener dresses the muleteer’s hat with hot wine-lees, and a tailor fits four dozen bells to the harness. The carpenter and smith consult over the wheels. By the next morning, the conveyance and its team are ready at the gate, with the abbess and the novice Margarita prepared to depart.

The preparation makes the mules part of a whole human system of care and labor, but it does not make them obedient instruments. The muleteer gives each animal a lash, then another, before slipping into an inn at the foot of the hill. Left without him behind them, the mules climb of their own accord until they have covered about half the ascent. At a turn, the older mule looks back, sees the muleteer is absent, and stops. The pair exchange blunt declarations that they will go no farther, then halt together. Their decision interrupts the carefully organized expedition and leaves the abbess’s journey subject to the animals’ will.

A companion rather than a vehicle

Elsewhere, the narrator treats his mule as a companion whose preferences resemble his own. Crossing the plains of Languedoc, he says the animal loves society as much as he does and is always ready to make proposals to other beasts. The pair’s shared sociability becomes a measure of how much human variety the slow journey affords: the narrator imagines they would see less of human nature even in a month in Pall-Mall or St. James’s Street. The mule is not simply carrying an observer through scenery; its inclination toward company helps make the road a social world.

That partnership does not abolish disagreement. At a gathering between Nismes and Lunel, after sunset, the mule makes a sudden dead stop at the sound of a fife and tabourin. The narrator identifies the music as an invitation to a dance, but the mule claims to be frightened and refuses to go on, invoking the same resolution as the abbess’s mules. Rather than argue, the narrator gets down, kicks off one boot into one ditch and the other into another, and goes to dance. The animal remains behind while its rider joins the company. Its refusal does not merely delay the journey; it opens a new episode on the road.

Pace, breakdown, and travel

The contrast between the mule’s pace and speed-driven travel recurs during the narrator’s passage through France. When his chaise is broken and his baggage is carried ahead in a cart, he imagines turning the mishap to advantage: a boat down the Rhône to Avignon, then a pair of mules or asses to cross Languedoc cheaply and at leisure. The breakdown, initially a misfortune, suggests both savings and renewed pleasure in travel. Although the narrator’s imagined route grows out of his own calculations, its slower animal transport belongs to the same narrative pattern as the mule’s refusals: progress need not mean pressing forward as quickly as possible.

He changes his mode of travel once more, choosing a mule so that he can cross the rich plain of Languedoc as slowly as a foot can fall. That deliberate slowness counters the conventional travel writer’s difficulty with plains, which are often dismissed as monotonous stretches between more reportable towns. The narrator instead makes the journey fruitful by attending to encounters along the way. The mule’s pace suits a form of travel built from interruptions and company rather than a straight line between destinations.

Diego’s mule in the embedded tale

In Hafen Slawkenbergius’s tale, a stranger enters Strasbourg on a dark mule, carrying a small cloak-bag containing a few shirts, shoes, and crimson-satin breeches. He tells the sentry he has been to the Promontory of Noses, is going on to Frankfort, and expects to return to Strasbourg in a month on his way to the borders of Crim Tartary. The sentry is struck by the stranger’s enormous nose. The stranger gives him a florin and explains that he carries a naked scimitar to defend it, turning the mule’s slow passage through the city into a scene where the traveler and his remarkable face become objects of public scrutiny.

The mule’s unhurried progress also allows its rider to overhear the talk around him. As it moves slowly enough for him to hear a dispute between the sentry and drummer and another between a trumpeter and his wife, the stranger makes a solemn vow that his nose will not be touched while Heaven gives him strength. The animal’s measured pace holds him within the city’s noise while his fears about injury, slander, and justice take shape. Later, the stranger speaks to the mule and to Julia, reaches his inn, sees that the mule is well cared for as promised, removes his cloak-bag, eats an omelet, and goes to bed around midnight.

The tale’s delayed disclosure makes the mule’s role more than atmospheric. After the stranger has gone to sleep, the narrative follows another traveler hastening toward Strasbourg. He is Fernandez, Julia’s brother, sent to find Diego and deliver her letter. Julia has fallen ill at Lyons after following Diego across the Pyrenees through France; she has asked her brother not to see her until he has found Diego and put the letter into his hands. The identity of the man whom the mule carried is thus tied to a separated couple and a search whose purpose has not yet been disclosed.

Fernandez delivers his sister’s message, and Diego sets out with him before he has finished composing a second stanza. Diego’s mule and Fernandez’s horse are ready at the inn door; the two men mount and ride away, cross the Rhine, traverse Alsace, and head toward Lyons. Before the Strasbourg crowd and the abbess of Quedlinburg begin their cavalcade, the travelers have crossed the Pyrenees with Julia and reached Valladolid safely. Across both the main journey and the embedded tale, the mule’s pace repeatedly shapes what can be seen and when: it can stop the road, sustain a leisurely encounter, or carry a traveler onward while the narrative circles toward its revelation.