Death and the attempt to escape it

Death and the attempt to escape it becomes a governing tension in the French travel narrative: the narrator fears the intimate circumstances of dying, yet discovers in haste, movement, and the prospect of new routes a cheerful counterforce. Death is neither disproved nor left behind. It follows as the journey’s shadow, while the narration turns travel’s practical details into a comic argument about how a person might keep it at bay.

Mortality imagined in advance

The narrator’s fear concerns not only death itself but the scene in which it might occur. He imagines that, if he could stipulate with Death as he does with his apothecary about a clyster, he would refuse to die before his friends. At home, their concern, their final care in wiping his brow and smoothing his pillow, would be so painful that it might aggravate his illness. He would rather die in a decent inn, where a few guineas could purchase the modest attentions he needed, delivered with punctuality but without the intimate distress of his friends’ presence.

That preference is more than a macabre joke about lodging. The imagined inn offers a managed, impersonal alternative to the emotional closeness of home: the narrator would choose purchased care in order to avoid being crucified by affection at the moment of death. Yet even this plan has a precise exception. He refuses to die at the inn in Abbeville, and orders the horses into the chaise at four in the morning, loudly enough to wake the dead. The hurried departure gives practical form to his wish not to be caught in the wrong place, while the phrase about waking the dead lets the comedy brush against the very fate he is trying to evade.

Haste, routes, and the comic delays of travel

The journey does not offer a straightforward escape. Between Calais and Paris there are three distinct roads, and the competing claims of deputies from the towns along them can consume half a day before the traveller even chooses a direction. The first road, by Lisle and Arras, is longer but more interesting and instructive; another runs by Amiens and offers Chantilly. Travel promises motion, but the decisions and disputes that organize it can hold the traveller in place.

The narrator makes that contradiction still sharper by treating travel writing as a kind of counterfeit experience. He admits that he knows almost nothing of Calais: he arrived at dusk and left in darkness, learning only a little from his barber. Nevertheless, he claims that by joining fragments and making one thing stand for another, he could produce a chapter full of seemingly precise details, enough to pass for the town clerk’s account. His mock confidence exposes how easily a traveller’s authority can be manufactured from inference and convention. In a narrative concerned with evading death through movement, the city that is barely seen becomes a reminder that motion does not guarantee knowledge, much less control.

Even sleeping on the road proves difficult. A traveller might be comfortably placed to sleep for fifty miles, yet every stage brings another payment: three livres and fifteen sous counted out by hand. The narrator tries to defeat the interruption by preparing the exact sum in a piece of paper. But two sous are still needed for a drink, a Louis XIV twelve-sous piece will not pass, or a previous stage’s account must be settled. The post-road book, printed in tiny type, forces his eyes open; demands and disputes awaken his reason again. Travel’s repeated payments turn the body’s wish for rest into an obstacle course, and its ordinary irritations keep the traveller awake whether or not he would prefer to sleep.

Motion as a reprieve

The narrator openly rejects the idea that restless motion is a curse. Against the interpretation that rolling about means unquietness, he argues that, for someone as thin as himself, motion is life and joy, while standing still or moving slowly is death. He summons the horses, calls for the wheels to be greased, and insists that not a moment be lost. The contrast between the corpulent commentator who praises rest and the thin narrator who exalts speed turns bodily difference into a comic theory of existence: the same movement can signify torment to one person and vitality to another.

The wheel becomes the image through which the argument takes shape. The commentator’s enemies are condemned to keep rolling, but the narrator distinguishes the fast post-chaise wheel from the slow cart-wheel, which might groan around once in an age. The distinction makes pace a matter of perspective as well as circumstance. A wheel can embody frantic, almost compulsory travel or a near-stationary life; the narrator chooses the first, treating speed as a way to feel alive even when it cannot promise safety.

When the chaise breaks apart at Lyons, the accident briefly seems to confirm the value of a change in motion. The narrator calculates that he can travel by water to Avignon for less than seven livres, then hire mules—or asses—and cross the plains of Languedoc cheaply. He imagines saving four hundred livres, with pleasure worth twice the money: flying down the Rhône, with Vivarais to one side and Dauphiny to the other, glimpsing Vienne, Valence, and Viviers, and watching castles, rocks, mountains, and cataracts pass. His ruined carriage is transformed, in imagination, into the opening of a more exhilarating route. That enthusiasm lasts only until a chaise undertaker offers to refit or buy the wreck. The narrator decides to sell it, counting the ironwork, glasses, and leather as separate values. The mishap thus becomes both a material loss and a chance to redirect the journey.

Death in pursuit

The most explicit image of escape comes when the narrator has the whole south of France, from the Rhône to the Garonne, to cross at his own leisure. He says that he has left Death far behind, then stages Death as a pursuer who has followed many people through France but never at such a mettlesome pace. The chase reverses the expected emotional register: the narrator flees cheerfully, while Death continues after him but seems to lose confidence as the distance grows. Each step Death loses softens his looks, prompting the narrator to wonder why he is fleeing so fast.

The apparent victory changes the narrator’s pace rather than ending the pursuit. Despite what the post-office commissary has said, he changes his mode of travel again, turning from the rattling haste of the previous course to the imagined slowness of riding a mule across the rich plains of Languedoc. The change is not a final reconciliation with death, nor does the text show Death disappearing. Instead, the chase allows speed and leisure to coexist as temporary choices: first rapid flight, then a slower passage across the same landscape.

Travel’s limits and the meaning of escape

The journey repeatedly complicates the notion that movement can secure freedom from death. Haste can be interrupted by route choices, tolls, bookkeeping, broken equipment, or the ordinary demands of travel. At Lyons, the wrecked chaise opens a new possibility; in the southern plains, the narrator chooses to slow down even as Death remains behind him. Escape is therefore not a single successful departure but a sequence of recalculations, each shaped by circumstance and the traveller’s changing appetite for speed.

The travel narrative also makes the pursuit of experience uncertain. The narrator mocks the traveller who feels obliged to describe every town, and his account of barely seen Calais demonstrates how an elaborate description can be assembled without sustained observation. That gap between movement and knowledge echoes the larger gap between movement and mastery: a traveller can cross great distances, choose among roads, change vehicles, and imagine Death falling behind, but none of those acts establishes that mortality has been overcome. The comedy comes from allowing the escape to feel exhilarating while leaving its limit intact. Death remains the pursuer; motion is the narrator’s chosen form of resistance, not a guarantee of deliverance.