Auxerre is a two-day stop on the Shandy family’s grand tour through Europe, but it matters less as a catalogue of sights than as a place where travel, family argument, and Walter Shandy’s theories collide. The visit to the Abbey of Saint Germain produces a new piece of evidence for his system of Christian names, while the narrative’s simultaneous departures from Auxerre turn the town into a demonstration of how the book resists a straight itinerary.

Place on the Tour

The family reaches Auxerre during a journey through France and Italy that Walter Shandy undertakes with his son, accompanied by Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Obadiah. Tristram says that his father’s researches found material even in a desert, and that the family’s encounters and scrapes, often consequences of Walter’s systems and obstinacy, made this tour unlike other accounts of Europe. Auxerre is one of the places where those eccentric habits leave enough behind to furnish the narrator with a story.

Walter stops the party in Auxerre for two days. Tristram singles out the town as particularly rich in material from his father’s travels, whose observations of character, manners, and customs diverged from those of Uncle Toby, Trim, and Tristram himself. The town’s importance therefore arises not only from what the party sees but from the competing ways its members interpret what they see.

The Abbey and Walter’s System

While dinner is being prepared, Walter proposes a visit to the Abbey of Saint Germain to see the bodies recommended by Monsieur Sequier. Uncle Toby agrees readily, saying he would go to see any body. When Walter clarifies that the bodies are mummies, Toby jokes that there would be no need to shave. Walter turns the joke into a practical suggestion: they should go bearded, like relations. Corporal Trim lends his master his arm and follows behind as the party sets out.

At the abbey, a young Benedictine sacristan lights a torch and leads the visitors to the tomb of Saint Heribald. He describes the dead man as a renowned prince of the house of Bavaria, influential under Charlemagne, Louis le Debonnair, and Charles the Bald. Uncle Toby infers that such a figure must also have been a gallant soldier; the sacristan replies that Heribald was a monk. Toby and Trim look to one another for comfort and find none, while Walter responds with amusement. The exchange turns the visit from solemn inspection into a scene of mismatched assumptions: Toby reads the sacristan’s account through military experience, only to have the expected soldier replaced by a monk.

Another tomb supplies Walter with what he considers a more successful discovery. On hearing that Saint Optat was a bishop, he exclaims that he had thought so and writes the information in his pocket-book as fresh support for his system of Christian names. Tristram presents his father as so absorbed in the search for confirmation that even a treasure in the tomb would have enriched him less. Pleased with the visit, Walter decides to remain in Auxerre for another day. The town’s additional day is thus caused not by a practical travel need but by the satisfaction his theory draws from the abbey’s evidence.

A Split Itinerary

Auxerre also marks a break in the account’s sequence. Tristram says that he has been advancing through two journeys at once: he has already left Auxerre in the journey currently being written, yet is only halfway out of it in the journey he plans to write later. He places himself at the same moment crossing the Auxerre marketplace with Walter and Uncle Toby on the way back to dinner, entering Lyons with his post-chaise shattered, and sitting in a pavilion on the banks of the Garonne while composing the account.

This deliberate overlap makes the town more than a point on a map. A conventional travel narrative promises forward motion from one place to the next; here the narrator is still walking through Auxerre while already entering another city and composing from elsewhere. The discrepancy is not an error to be resolved but a visible feature of the book’s form: the journey’s chronology bends around the act of telling it.

Travel Writing and What Counts as Knowledge

The treatment of Auxerre belongs to a wider joke about travel accounts. Earlier, the narrator notes that three roads run between Calais and Paris and that arguments for their respective routes can consume half a day. He mocks the travel writer who feels obliged to describe every town, even when passing through it quietly would do. In the same spirit, he admits that he knows little of Calais, having arrived at dusk and left in darkness, yet claims that by drawing one thing from another he could write a detailed chapter that would make him seem like the town clerk.

That contrast between direct observation and assembled description clarifies what Auxerre contributes. Its account is not presented as a neutral inventory: it comes through Tristram’s framing of his father’s interests, the family’s conversation, and the sacristan’s report. The episode shows how a traveller’s expectations can redirect attention. Walter goes to see the abbey’s bodies, but the detail that most excites him is a bishop’s name, which he treats as evidence for a personal theory.

The narrative also repeatedly makes travel’s practical conditions interrupt its imagined freedom. On the road, paying for horses at each stage—three livres and fifteen sous at a time—keeps a traveller from sleeping, as discrepancies in the fare and the need to consult the small-print post-road book bring him back to wakefulness. Later, entering Lyons with his chaise broken, Tristram imagines saving money and gaining pleasure by travelling down the Rhône and across Languedoc. Against these changing routes and interruptions, Auxerre is a stop whose duration expands because of an intellectual discovery rather than a smooth, predetermined itinerary.

Narrative Significance

Auxerre joins place, family character, and narrative design in a compact episode. The abbey’s tombs expose the distance between Uncle Toby’s military expectations and the sacristan’s account, while Saint Optat gives Walter a new prop for his reasoning about names. The narrator then refuses to leave the town in a single, orderly movement: he is simultaneously returning through its marketplace, departing elsewhere, and writing from another setting. Auxerre consequently stands at once as a destination on the tour and as a hinge in a story that makes the act of travelling inseparable from the unsettled act of narration.