Fontainebleau enters the narrative as a destination whose supposed attractions are delivered with the assurance of a pocket guide and withdrawn in the same breath. The narrator places it about forty miles south of Paris, in a large forest, and says the king visits every two or three years with his court for the hunt. An English gentleman, the advice continues, might join the sport if he can obtain a horse and avoid outpacing the king. The passage’s decisive point is not the description but its reversal: the narrator declares that none of it is true.

A destination in the travel itinerary

Fontainebleau belongs to the narrator’s southward progress through France. After leaving Chantilly, he says the roads are paved, the post stages short, and the days long; although it is only noon, he expects to reach Fontainebleau before the king. The comic aside that follows—he does not know whether the king is going there—makes the destination part of a journey narrated through brisk movement and improvisation rather than verified observation.

The itinerary’s confident pace is itself significant. Fontainebleau appears not through a reported visit or a detailed account of what the narrator saw, but as a place he is supposedly about to reach. The text thus makes the journey’s forward motion more certain than the traveller’s knowledge of the destination.

A guidebook account undone

The narrator offers a compact set of facts for anyone asked about Fontainebleau: its approximate distance and direction from Paris, its position in a great forest, the king’s periodic visits with his court, and the opportunity for a fashionable English visitor to join the hunt. The practical warning not to speak too loudly about the opportunity is also part of the performance, as though the advice were insider knowledge that might make horses harder to secure.

Then the narrator breaks the guide’s authority outright, declaring that the account is not true and moving on. That abrupt admission turns the passage into a parody of travel instruction: a plausible-sounding description, complete with a useful detail and a caution, can be composed without being grounded in experience. Fontainebleau becomes a test case for the difference between an authoritative travel voice and dependable knowledge.

Narrative significance

The episode’s brevity sharpens its joke. A location that might invite a conventional account of royal life, scenery, and sport is instead reduced to a few portable claims, then exposed as invention. The narrator’s brisk command to continue the journey refuses the leisurely descriptive pause expected of travel writing and makes the falsehood part of the book’s movement.

Fontainebleau therefore matters less as a documented setting than as an example of how the journey’s narration manufactures and unsettles geographical knowledge. Its apparent certainty lasts only until the narrator names it as false; the destination remains on the route, while the description of it cannot be trusted.