Vespers

Vespers is the evening office that, in the Strasbourg episode, marks the beginning of a night of sleeplessness brought on by the stranger’s nose. Paired with Matins at dawn, it measures the disturbance’s duration while giving the comic frenzy a religious frame: from one office to the next, people who might ordinarily have gone to bed are kept awake by curiosity, speculation, and imagined visions.

The Night in Strasbourg

After the tumult in Strasburg has abated for the night, the townspeople go to bed, but they do not find the bodily or mental rest enjoyed by the stranger, who has fallen asleep at his inn. In the story’s fanciful account, Queen Mab divides his nose in the night into as many different noses as there are heads in the city. That transformation is not presented as an event the townspeople witness; rather, it gives narrative form to the way the nose proliferates in their imaginations.

The Abbess of Quedlinburg, visiting with four senior officers of her chapter to consult the university about a case of conscience, is ill through the night. The stranger’s nose has, in the narrator’s conceit, taken its place on the pineal gland of her brain. It sets the imaginations of the four dignitaries in such motion that none can sleep, and they rise like ghosts. Vespers establishes the far end of the night in which this agitation takes hold; Matins will establish its end.

Sleeplessness Measured from Vespers to Matins

The disturbance reaches beyond the abbess’s party. Members of the Third Order of Saint Francis, the Nuns of Mount Calvary, the Premonstratensians, the Cluniac nuns, the Carthusians, and other stricter communities, sleeping in blankets or haircloth, toss from side to side and scratch themselves until they emerge nearly flayed. The narrator compares their suffering to a trial by the fire of Saint Antony. Their loss of sleep is explicitly bounded by the offices: they have not shut their eyes from Vespers to Matins.

That phrasing makes Vespers more than a decorative reference to the church clock. It fixes the disturbance within a recognizable daily rhythm, and the parallel endpoint makes the night seem both finite and interminable: a whole liturgical interval has passed without sleep. The stark contrast with the stranger, who falls asleep within minutes, heightens the joke. He rests while the townspeople and religious communities spend the night being mastered by their own responses to him.

From Private Unease to Public Inquiry

The Nuns of Saint Ursula provide the episode’s practical counterexample: they do not attempt to go to bed at all. The dean, prebendaries, capitulars, and other members of the cathedral body, assembled in the morning to consider a case concerning buttered buns, wish they had followed that example. The change from a night of bodily agitation to a morning meeting shows the rumor’s reach into both convent life and institutional business.

The following day, the Abbess of Quedlingberg and other senior women send for the trumpeter’s wife, who walks through the streets carrying her husband’s trumpet as the best apparatus the straitness of the time allows for demonstrating her theory. She stays for three days. Elsewhere, the sentry and drummer lecture beneath the city gates; the innkeeper and ostler hold forth by the stable-yard; the innkeeper’s wife gives her account in a back room. Townspeople gather according to their faith and credulity, and each receives the intelligence desired. Against this succession of public explanations, the duration from Vespers to Matins is the episode’s first compact measure of how swiftly curiosity has overwhelmed ordinary life.

Narrative Function

The interval from Vespers to Matins turns a conventional measure of time into a comic scale for collective obsession. The prose moves from the stranger’s individual sleep to the imagined division of his nose, then outward through the abbess’s disturbed household, the stricter sisterhoods, and the city’s eager lecturers. This enlargement makes the nose seem to occupy more and more minds even though the townspeople’s accounts differ.

The religious frame deepens the irony without changing the concrete point: the communities lose a night’s rest not to an actual visitation but to stories, conjectures, and the restless force of curiosity. Vespers names the opening boundary of that night; Matins closes it. Between them, the episode makes elapsed time visible as a measure of contagious attention, while the stranger remains peacefully asleep.