Navarre is the setting for the court episode in which the word “Whiskers” rises into fashion and then falls into indecency. Its significance lies less in geography than in the miniature society gathered around the queen: there, a word’s meaning is made and unmade by the uncertain traffic between gallantry, devotion, and innuendo.

The Court and Its Social World

At the court of the queen of Navarre, La Fosseuse first speaks of “Whiskers” before the queen, who hears the word distinctly but initially cannot tell what it signifies. La Fosseuse repeats it, then explains that a young cavalier has a particularly gallant pair. The exchange makes Navarre’s court a place where a single word can be uttered plainly yet carry a mystery beyond its literal sense.

The word spreads through the kingdom’s best company. Its success depends on the court’s mixture of gallantry and devotion: “Whiskers” can be attached to either, and its suggestiveness makes it attractive to some and suspect to others. The clergy support it, the laity oppose it, and women divide over it. Navarre thus appears as a social arena in which the meaning of language is contested collectively rather than settled by definition.

The Word’s Rise and Reversal

The court’s attention is drawn to the young Sieur De Croix as he passes through the second court. Several maids of honour praise his appearance, bearing, shape, and legs; La Fosseuse and La Rebours answer that he has no whiskers at all. The contrast between the company’s admiration and this pointed lack gives the fashionable word a concrete object, while making its application to De Croix unstable.

The queen carries the puzzle into her oratory, turning the word over in her thoughts as she walks through the gallery. The scene links courtly talk to private religious reflection without resolving the ambiguity. Navarre’s divided response is not merely a debate about vocabulary: the word’s suggestive force moves between public conversation, flirtation, and the queen’s attempt to understand what she has heard.

La Fosseuse later traces the outline of a small whisker on her upper lip with the blunt end of a bodkin and passes the bodkin to La Rebours, who shakes her head. The gesture makes the word’s implications visible without explaining them away. The court recognizes that “Whiskers” has been wounded by La Fosseuse’s handling of it; after lingering for a few months, it becomes indecent and finally unfit for use. De Croix, meanwhile, leaves Navarre because he lacks whiskers.

Reputation and Narrative Significance

The episode presents Navarre as a bounded world in which linguistic fashion can spread rapidly and collapse just as quickly. A word gains currency because its associations remain open; once those associations become too marked, its social usefulness reverses. The narrator compares this fate with that of “Noses,” said to have suffered a similar decline in parts of Europe, and with other everyday terms imagined as vulnerable to the same process.

Navarre’s court therefore serves as a comic demonstration of language’s instability. The place’s social mixture—clergy and laity, queen and attendants, devotion and gallantry—does not merely provide a backdrop for the word’s career; it generates the competing interpretations that first sustain and then ruin it.