Frankfort is a destination repeatedly named but never reached onstage in Hafen Slawkenbergius’s tale of the stranger with the extraordinary nose. The stranger says he is bound there and promises to return to Strasburg in a month; that simple itinerary becomes a device for delaying the promised encounter, directing the Strasburgers’ curiosity, and exposing how a place in a travel narrative can matter less as a landscape than as a point on a map of expectation. In the book’s broader reflections on travel, Frankfort also belongs to a choice of roads and to a geography that the narrator both invokes and mocks.

A Destination in the Nose Tale

At the gate of Strasburg, a stranger riding a dark mule tells the sentinel that he has been to the Promontory of Noses, is going on to Frankfort, and will be back in Strasburg a month later on his way toward the borders of Crim Tartary. His face, and especially the nose that the sentinel has never seen the like of, makes the announcement more than routine travel information. The route gives the stranger a reason to leave, while the promise of a return gives the townspeople a date on which they may hope to see him again.

The stranger repeats the itinerary after a brief appearance on the grand parade. Having changed into crimson satin breeches with a fringed appendage and walked three turns, he sees the trumpeter’s wife across the parade and turns back to his inn, anxious that his nose might be attempted. He packs his clothes, calls for his mule, and says he is going forward to Frankfort and will return to Strasburg that day month. His ostensible journey therefore proceeds in tandem with his guardedness: the audience is promised a future sight, but the stranger’s conduct makes clear that access to the spectacle is not assured.

His departure is marked by concern for the mule as well as by self-display. He strokes the animal and says that it has carried him and his cloak-bag more than six hundred leagues; when the innkeeper remarks on the length of the journey, the stranger answers that he has visited the Promontory of Noses and obtained one of the finest noses ever allotted to a single man. Frankfort is thus situated in a deliberately extravagant itinerary. The named destination sounds practical, but it is embedded in a comic account of travel whose scale and purpose are inseparable from the nose.

The Appointment and the Crowd

The promised return gives the townspeople of Strasburg a fixed date around which their anticipation gathers. On the twenty-eighth day, a procession sets out at sunrise to meet the stranger on the road. The narrator’s impossible-seeming figures—seven thousand coaches, fifteen thousand single-horse chairs, and twenty thousand wagons—turn local curiosity into a mass expedition. Senators, counsellors, syndics, beguines, widows, wives, virgins, canons, and concubines are all swept into the spectacle; the abbess of Quedlinburg leads with her officers in one coach, beside the dean of Strasburg and the chapter’s dignitaries, while the rest follow in disorder on horseback, on foot, or by the Rhine.

Frankfort matters here because the promised route organizes desire without delivering its object. The crowd goes out to meet the stranger, but the narrative’s comic timing has already placed other travellers and other journeys in motion. The tale’s narrator pauses to announce a catastrophe and to praise the ordered dramatic structure of Hafen Slawkenbergius’s story, emphasizing how its stages grow into one another. The grand appointment is consequently both a plot hinge and a display of narrative artifice: the road to Frankfort sustains expectation even as the tale prepares to divert it.

Routes Cross, Encounters Fail

A separate traveller is hurrying toward Strasburg, but after riding about a league he reconsiders the attempt. Strasburg, he reflects, is a great imperial and sovereign city, garrisoned by five thousand troops; arriving at its gates that night might cost him a ducat or even a ducat and a half. He turns back to the inn he has passed and arrives three minutes after the stranger has been shown to his chamber. The two routes nearly intersect, but the travellers’ different calculations—one’s guarded departure and the other’s concern about the price and uncertainty of entering the city—keep their stories adjacent rather than joined.

The tale then carries Diego and Fernandez away from the expected meeting. They mount, cross the Rhine, traverse Alsace, and shape their course toward Lyons; before the Strasburgers’ cavalcade has even set out, Diego and Julia have crossed the Pyrenees and reached Valladolid. Since Diego is in Spain, he cannot meet the courteous stranger on the Frankfort road. The narrative explicitly makes geography the reason for the missed encounter, then turns the Strasburgers’ thwarted curiosity into a three-day, three-night wandering on that road before they can bring themselves to return home.

The contrast is structural as well as geographical. Diego’s rapid passage carries him and Julia toward safety, while the Strasburgers’ movement is driven by curiosity and ends in frustrated pursuit. Frankfort’s road is not presented through a sustained description of the city; it is the line along which anticipated meetings become impossible. The tale’s humor depends on the gap between the crowd’s conviction that the stranger can be found and the interlocking journeys that keep him elsewhere.

Frankfort in the Book’s Travel Geography

Outside the embedded tale, Frankfort appears in a practical-looking discussion of the three roads between Calais and Paris. The narrator observes that deputies from the towns along those routes can consume half a day arguing over which road to take. One option leads by Lille and Arras, longer but more interesting and instructive; the second goes by Amiens. The passage places Frankfort within the book’s larger habit of treating destinations and routes as subjects for deliberation, enumeration, and digression rather than as simple links in a straight itinerary.

That habit becomes explicit in the narrator’s account of Calais. He admits that he knows little of the town: it was dusk when he landed and dark when he departed. Yet he claims that by combining fragments, inference, and the act of writing he could produce a chapter detailed enough to seem the work of the town clerk. The subsequent mock description, beginning with the town’s variant names, turns travel writing’s authority into a joke about how easily confident detail can be assembled without sustained observation. Frankfort’s appearance in a list of roads belongs to this same tension between geographical knowledge and the conventions that make it look complete.

The book also makes travel concrete through its interruptions. The narrator describes the repeated need to pay at each French post stage, count out three livres fifteen sous, consult a small-print road book, and answer disputes about change and fees; even a traveller determined to sleep is repeatedly awakened. Later, after his chaise is broken, he imagines going by water to Avignon and continuing across Languedoc by mule or ass, converting mishap into a cheaper and more pleasurable route. These episodes do not supply a portrait of Frankfort itself, but they clarify the narrative world in which its name operates: travel is a chain of roads, costs, delays, and improvised changes of plan, while the telling of that travel keeps wandering away from a straight line.