A sentimental journey through France & Italy by Laurence Sterne. With illustrations by T. H. Robinson. 1898 [Leather Bound]

A sentimental journey through France & Italy by Laurence Sterne. With illustrations by T. H. Robinson. 1898 [Leather Bound] Plot Summary

Introduction

The Channel crossing from Dover to Calais marks more than a mere twenty-one miles of churning water—it opens a gateway to revelation. Yorick, our narrator and self-proclaimed "Sentimental Traveller," discovers this truth the moment his feet touch French soil, when a simple meal transforms into philosophical epiphany about the nature of human connection. What begins as an impulsive journey to escape English melancholy becomes an odyssey through the tender mechanics of the human heart. In smoke-filled Calais inns and glittering Parisian salons, along dusty roads where broken souls wander, Yorick encounters a cast of characters who strip away his presumptions about virtue, charity, and love. Each meeting—with a humble Franciscan monk, a mysterious lady in distress, a loyal servant named La Fleur—becomes a mirror reflecting his own contradictions. The France he discovers pulses with sensuality and sentiment, challenging his English reserve at every turn, forcing him to confront the uncomfortable truth that feeling, not reason, drives the human experience.

Chapter 1: The Impulse to Travel: Departing England for Foreign Shores

The argument began over France, as most worthwhile arguments do. Yorick found himself defending a country he had never visited, claiming "They order this matter better in France" with the confidence of absolute ignorance. His companion's smug triumph—"Strange! You have been in France?"—stung like salt in a wound. Twenty-one miles. That single measurement haunted Yorick as he packed his meager belongings: half a dozen shirts, black silk breeches, and the worn coat upon his back. The distance between Dover and Calais seemed laughably small, yet it promised to grant him rights he could only imagine. Rights to speak with authority about French customs, French wisdom, French superiority in all matters of civilization. The packet sailed at nine the next morning. By three in the afternoon, Yorick sat before a fricasseed chicken in a Calais inn, officially and incontrovertibly on French soil. The transformation felt immediate and profound. The same man who had been packing shirts in London that morning now contemplated the King of France's health with generous magnanimity, toasting a monarch he had never seen. But darker thoughts intruded upon his euphoria. The droits d'aubaine—that ancient law allowing the French crown to seize the possessions of foreigners who died on French soil. Even the small picture of Eliza he wore close to his heart would be torn away, should death find him in this foreign land. The cruelty of the law struck him as deeply uncivilized, unworthy of a people renowned for sentiment and fine feeling. Yet as the Burgundy warmed his blood, Yorick's irritation melted into philosophical reflection. How light the heaviest metals feel when peace fills the heart! He found himself reaching for his purse, seeking objects worthy of his generosity, every vessel in his frame dilating with goodwill toward his fellow man.

Chapter 2: Encounters in Calais: The Monk, the Lady, and Lessons in Humanity

The test of Yorick's charitable impulses arrived in brown robes and broken sandals. A Franciscan monk entered the inn, staff in hand, seeking alms for his impoverished convent. The sight should have moved Yorick to immediate generosity—had he not, in that precise moment, predetermined to give the man nothing. The contradiction tormented him even as he buttoned his purse tight. Here stood a figure Guido might have painted: mild, pale, penetrating eyes that seemed to look beyond this world. Seventy years had scattered white hairs across his tonsure, yet his bearing remained graceful, his manner touched with quiet dignity. When he spoke of his convent's needs, his deprecation carried such genuine humility that Yorick felt bewitched despite his resolution. But English Protestant suspicion won over Catholic charity. Yorick delivered a lecture on the proper distribution of alms, distinguishing between those who earned honest bread and those who ate from others' labor in holy idleness. The monk made no reply to this theological assault. Instead, he pressed both hands to his breast in silent resignation and withdrew. The moment the door closed, Yorick's heart smote him with terrible force. Every ungracious syllable crowded back into his imagination, each word more cruel than memory had recorded. He had denied the monk his right to charity—that was legitimate. But the addition of unkind language transformed legitimate refusal into petty cruelty. The monk's gray hairs, his courteous figure, his gentle acceptance of insult—all rose to accuse Yorick of behavior beneath his own moral standards. In the courtyard, seeking distraction through the purchase of a traveling chaise, Yorick encountered the mysterious lady who would haunt his journey. She had been conversing with the very monk he had wounded, and something in her demeanor suggested she knew of his discourtesy. When circumstance brought them together at the door of the coach house, her black silk gloves and the way she accepted his offered hand hinted at depths of character he longed to explore.

Chapter 3: Paris and the Art of Sensibility: Characters and Moral Reflections

Paris struck Yorick like a physical blow, its yellow and blue and green splendor reducing him to insignificance. From his hotel window, he watched the glittering cavalcade of pleasure-seekers tilting at joy with golden lances, while he stood dusty and forgotten in his black coat. The city's scale dwarfed him—even the barber's casual promise that his wig buckle would withstand oceanic submersion revealed a grandeur of conception that made English modesty seem provincial. But Paris taught Yorick the currency of flattery through brutal efficiency. He discovered this watching a mysterious beggar who worked the Opera crowds with surgical precision. The man told his story only to women, whispering in their ears with the air of sharing state secrets rather than requesting charity. His success rate approached perfection—every woman reached for her purse, every approach yielded coins. The secret, when Yorick finally witnessed it, proved elegantly simple: the beggar dealt in compliments as refined as a chemist's compounds. He praised their beauty, referenced imaginary admirers, suggested that their bright eyes outshone the morning sun. The women, starved for such attentions in their daily commerce with shopkeepers and servants, paid gladly for the momentary transformation into goddesses worthy of poetic tribute. Yorick applied these lessons to his own social climbing with uncomfortable success. At Madame de V's salon, he argued against her fashionable atheism not through theological conviction but through psychological manipulation. He suggested that her beauty required the protection of religious sentiment—that without such barriers, men like himself would form immediate designs upon her person. The flattery, wrapped in apparent concern for her spiritual welfare, proved irresistible. The success sickened him even as it elevated his social standing. Every compliment became a calculated transaction, every sentiment a performance designed to extract invitations and favorable opinions. He found himself agreeing with every man's position, adopting every group's prejudices, becoming a mirror that reflected back their own biases in more elegant language. When the Count de Faineant embraced him with passionate enthusiasm for his supposed wit and wisdom, Yorick reached his breaking point. The embrace felt like the kiss of betrayal—acceptance purchased through the prostitution of his authentic self.

Chapter 4: La Fleur and the Spirit of Service: Loyalty and Human Connection

Salvation arrived in the form of a drumming French peasant whose only qualifications were an irrepressible smile and complete incompetence at every task except making others happy. La Fleur entered Yorick's service at Montreuil, recommended by the innkeeper as a faithful servant whose heart compensated for his limited skills. The recommendation proved accurate beyond measure. La Fleur possessed the rare gift of eternal optimism wedded to absolute loyalty. When his bidet refused to pass a dead donkey in the road and unceremoniously deposited him in the dust, La Fleur's only comment was a cheerful "Diable!" before remounting to continue the battle. When the bidet finally fled back to town, abandoning La Fleur in oversized riding boots, his response was the philosophical "Peste!" of a man who accepted life's absurdities with grace. But La Fleur's true genius revealed itself in human connection. Within hours of reaching Paris, he had charmed the Count's entire household into spontaneous celebration. His fife transformed the kitchen into a festival ground where maids and scullions, cooks and footmen, even the household pets joined an impromptu dance that reached the aristocratic floors above. This natural talent for joy proved more valuable than conventional competence. When Yorick wrestled with a diplomatic crisis—the need to respond to Madame de L's letter without proper social guidance—La Fleur produced a solution from his collection of love letters. The drummer's correspondence with a corporal's wife, appropriately edited, became the foundation for aristocratic communication. The arrangement revealed the essential democracy of human feeling beneath the artificial hierarchies of class. A drummer's passion, refined by a gentleman's vocabulary, could move a countess to gracious response. La Fleur understood this instinctively, his heart operating according to natural law rather than social convention. When Sunday arrived and La Fleur requested permission to court his own French maiden, Yorick recognized the perfect symmetry. Master and servant, each pursuing romantic adventure in their proper spheres, united by the universal pursuit of connection that transcends all boundaries of birth and education.

Chapter 5: The Starling's Lament: Meditations on Freedom and Constraint

The Lieutenant de Police's inquiry about Yorick's missing passport should have terrified him. Instead, it triggered a philosophical meditation on confinement that began with characteristic English bravado and ended in profound emotional collapse. Yorick initially dismissed the threat of the Bastille with cynical calculations—nine livres daily allowance, pen and paper provided, patient endurance rewarded with eventual release. His confidence shattered at the sound of a single voice. "I can't get out—I can't get out," cried the starling in its cage, and suddenly Yorick's rational defenses crumbled like paper fortifications in rain. The mechanical repetition of those four words, learned from an English groom and meaningless to French ears, carried more genuine anguish than any human lamentation. The starling had been caught as a fledgling on Dover's cliffs, carried to Paris as a curiosity, taught its pathetic vocabulary in prison, then abandoned when its entertainment value faded. Now it performed its small tragedy for every passerby, pressing against the wire with desperate hope that someone might possess the key to freedom. Yorick's attempts to release the creature failed against the twisted wire of its cage. But the bird's imprisonment had already accomplished its true purpose—shattering the comfortable illusions that allowed Yorick to contemplate his own potential captivity with philosophical detachment. The starling's mechanical cry revealed the essential truth about confinement: no reasoning, however sophisticated, could transform chains into choice. The revelation sent Yorick stumbling upstairs, his systematic arguments about the Bastille collapsing into bitter acknowledgment of slavery's absolute nature. Standing on his hotel's staircase, he knelt in spontaneous prayer to Liberty herself, that "thrice sweet and gracious goddess" whose absence transforms kings into paupers and whose presence makes beggars rich beyond measurement. That night, Yorick commissioned a carriage for Versailles. Whatever the cost in pride or principle, he would seek the passport that would keep him from discovering, personally, the difference between freedom and its philosophical analysis.

Chapter 6: Maria of Moulines: The Power of Shared Sorrow

The mad girl sat beneath a poplar tree, her white dress stark against the gathering dusk. Yorick had traveled miles out of his way to find Maria, drawn by his friend Shandy's account of her tragic madness. What he discovered beside the small brook challenged every assumption about the relationship between reason and suffering. Maria's story unfolded in fragments beautiful and terrible. Seduced and abandoned, her mind had snapped under the double blow of lost love and paternal disappointment. Yet madness had not destroyed her essence—it had refined it, burning away everything false to reveal a purity of feeling that sane society could neither understand nor tolerate. She spoke of wandering to Rome, of walking barefoot through the Apennines, of surviving on charity and providence through regions where wolves devoured the unwary. Her dog Sylvio had replaced the faithless goat that once provided companionship, and her simple declaration—"Thou shalt not leave me"—carried more genuine love than all of Paris's elaborate romantic intrigues. When Yorick sat beside her and began wiping away her tears, the act opened floodgates in his own heart. Her sorrow was not abstract tragedy suitable for artistic contemplation—it was immediate, overwhelming, undeniable proof of feeling's supremacy over reason. As he alternated between his handkerchief and hers, steeping both in her tears and his own, he felt "undescribable emotions" that confirmed the soul's existence beyond materialist philosophy. Maria's small treasures told their own story of loyalty transcending madness. She had kept Shandy's handkerchief, washed in the brook and folded in vine leaves, waiting two years to return it to its owner. Such devotion shamed the calculated affections of civilized society, where promises dissolved at the first inconvenience. Their parting at Moulines carried ceremonial weight. Maria, despite her disordered mind, possessed a natural nobility that elevated her above the titled ladies of Yorick's Parisian acquaintance. Her affliction had purified rather than diminished her, creating a transparency of emotion that made ordinary social interaction seem like elaborate pretense.

Chapter 7: The Delicate Arrangement: Honor and Propriety in Savoy

The inn at the foot of Mount Taurira offered only one private chamber, creating a situation that would have challenged the ingenuity of French farce writers. Yorick arrived first, securing the room and settling before a warm fire when a lady and her maid appeared, seeking shelter from the mountain storm. The hostess, with admirable practicality and no regard for delicate sensibilities, announced the arrangement: one room, three beds, three travelers. The Piedmontese lady, about thirty with health glowing in her cheeks, surveyed the accommodations with growing alarm. The beds stood parallel, separated by barely enough space for a small chair, positioned so close to the fire that the room's architecture created an intimate recess that mocked every convention of proper distance. The servant's quarters—a damp closet with a broken shutter—offered no refuge from the evening's awkwardness. What followed was negotiation as formal and precise as any international treaty. The lady and Yorick, both too refined to acknowledge their mutual embarrassment directly, spent two hours in diplomatic discussion, working out terms that would preserve honor while accepting necessity. Every detail required consideration: who would occupy which bed, what garments would be worn, what barriers could be erected. The final agreement bore the elaborate structure of legal documentation. Yorick would occupy the bed near the fire but surrender his nightclothes for the lady's reassurance. The lady would arrange for curtains to be pinned shut, creating visual privacy. Most critically, both parties would maintain absolute silence throughout the night, with provision only for Yorick's prayers. But human nature proved stronger than diplomatic protocols. The novelty of the situation, the consciousness of another's presence mere feet away, the very attempt to enforce unnatural silence—all conspired to create the tension they sought to avoid. When Yorick's involuntary exclamation broke the treaty's terms, the lady's response revealed that she too had found sleep impossible. Their whispered debate over treaty interpretation—whether "O my God!" constituted prayer or violation—dissolved the formal barriers they had constructed. In the darkness, reaching toward each other in explanation and assurance, their hands met across the narrow passage where the lady's maid had been sleeping, creating a moment of connection that transcended all their careful arrangements.

Summary

Yorick's sentimental journey reveals the beautiful futility of constructing rational barriers against the heart's imperatives. From the Calais monk who taught him the cost of predetermined charity to Maria's tears that dissolved his philosophical pretenses, every encounter stripped away another layer of English reserve. The starling's desperate cry—"I can't get out"—became the journey's central metaphor: souls imprisoned not by external circumstances but by their own fear of genuine feeling. La Fleur emerged as the journey's true philosopher, whose drumbeat wisdom recognized that human connection transcends social boundaries and rational calculation. His natural gift for joy, whether dancing with servants or courting maidens, demonstrated the democracy of the heart that makes aristocrats and peasants equal in love's republic. The final scene in the Savoy inn, where careful negotiations collapsed into inadvertent intimacy, completed Yorick's education in sentiment's supremacy over sense. He learned that the most profound connections occur not through planning but through the accidental touch of souls reaching toward each other across the darkness, discovering that the heart's geography recognizes no national boundaries, no social distinctions, no rational limitations—only the eternal human need to feel, to connect, and to be understood in all our beautiful, ridiculous, irreducible humanity.

About Author

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Laurence Sterne

Sterne delves into the complexity of human thought and individuality through a narrative style that defies conventional structures. His playful digressions and whimsical storytelling challenge readers to reflect on the nature of perception and time. By blending satire, sentimentality, and philosophical inquiry, Sterne positions himself as a pioneer of the modern novel, making his work a critical study in literary modernism.\n\nThrough his major works, such as "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy," Sterne illustrates his mastery in weaving humor with narrative experimentation. While "Tristram Shandy" gained him widespread acclaim for its comic yet insightful commentary on life, "A Sentimental Journey" underscores his ability to explore emotional landscapes with sensitivity. Sterne's role as an Anglican clergyman and his involvement in local politics further enriched his understanding of human nature, which is intricately reflected in his writings.\n\nReaders and scholars benefit from Sterne's innovative approaches as his works continue to inspire discussions on narrative form and human experience. Although he did not receive formal literary awards during his lifetime, the author achieved significant celebrity status, with his portraits painted by notable artists like Joshua Reynolds. This bio highlights how Sterne's legacy endures as a major influence on the development of the novel and modern literature, cementing his place as a significant literary figure whose works remain relevant to this day.

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