Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/217

 unwisdom of further indulgence in Parisian gaieties. Mrs. Sterne and Lydia joined him in July, and within two weeks they all went south to Toulouse, where he had hired a house at a rental of 30l. a year. Although he often talked of returning to Paris, he stayed with them at Toulouse for more than twelve months. Lydia was soon ‘hard at it with music, dancing, and French speaking.’ Mrs. Sterne, ‘a great economist,’ was ‘charmed’ by the cheapness of provisions, but would never let her husband out of her sight, following him everywhere so persistently as to excite pity for him among his friends (, p. 5). Sterne tried to relieve ennui by fabricating a seventh volume of ‘Tristram,’ in which he embodied his recent experience of foreign travel. He had originally intended, he told his political friends, to conduct his hero to various European courts so as to give himself the opportunity of comparing the political constitutions of foreign countries to their disadvantage with the government of England. But this design was very imperfectly executed. At Christmas he took part with other English visitors in private theatricals, playing in the ‘Busy Body’ or ‘The Journey to London.’ Life at Toulouse grew more irksome in the spring. Sterne suffered from ague, and things at home were not promising. Becket wrote that the sale of the last books of ‘Tristram’ was slackening. Of the four thousand copies, nearly a thousand hung fire (Morrison MS.) In July 1763 they removed to Bagnères de Bigorre in the Pyrenees. Thence they visited Aix and Marseilles, and in September settled down at Montpellier for the winter. On 30 Sept. Sterne wrote to Lord Fauconberg offering to purchase for him a hogshead of claret, and expressing his longing to be back at Coxwold (Wombwell MS.) In February 1764 he was ‘heartily tired of France,’ and next month he set his face homewards.

Mrs. Sterne did not share her husband's yearning for home. She declared her intention of staying behind at Montauban. Their daughter, she argued, ought to complete her education abroad, and they could save as much money in a year in France as would keep them in clothes for seven in England. ‘My system,’ Sterne wrote to Lord Fauconberg of his wife, ‘is to let her please herself;’ and although he deplored a long separation from his daughter, he accepted Mrs. Sterne's arguments. Her expenditure was to be restricted to two hundred guineas a year. Malicious friends treated the arrangement as a formal separation, suggested by Sterne. But Mrs. Sterne was wholly responsible for Sterne's return to England alone, and it was very unwillingly that he reconciled himself to the maintenance by his wife and daughter of a separate establishment.

On quitting his family Sterne remained a month (April–May) in Paris, and renewed his intimacy with French society (cf. Morrison MS.). Wilkes wrote to Churchill from Paris (10 April 1764) that Sterne and he were often in each other's company (Wilkes MS. in British Museum). He preached at the English ambassador's chapel on Hezekiah to ‘a concourse of all nations and religions’ (Sermons, No. 17), and sent his daughter books and a guitar. The summer was mainly spent in London, and in the early autumn he went to Scarborough to drink the waters. In August he settled down at Coxwold, after an absence of more than two and a half years. He was soon immersed in a further instalment of ‘Tristram,’ which was to narrate Uncle Toby's amour with the Widow Wadman. In December he had completed books vii. and viii., and took them to London. They were published on 26 Jan. 1765. Dinner engagements set in ‘a fortnight deep.’ Garrick and his wife were assiduous in their attentions, and he began a flirtation with a fashionable admirer, Lady Percy, a daughter of Lord Bute. His lungs gave him trouble, and he withdrew in April to Bath, where Gainsborough painted his portrait in a single sitting. He returned to his solitude at Coxwold in May, and in the autumn a second expedition abroad was recommended. In October 1765 he set out on a seven months' tour through France and Italy, which he immortalised in his ‘Sentimental Journey.’

At Calais he put up at M. Dessein's hotel (now pulled down), which gained so wide a reputation from the account Sterne gave of it that for more than half a century it was a place of pilgrimage for French and English travellers. At his next stopping-place, Montreuil, he engaged the drummer-boy La Fleur as his valet. A few weeks were spent with friends in Paris before a start was made for Lyons. There Sterne enjoyed the society of Wilkes's friend, Horne Tooke. Eight days were required for the journey through the mountain passes of Savoy, and at a wayside inn on the road to Modane, in the plains beyond, occurred, according to the ‘Sentimental Journey,’ the notorious incident with which that work abruptly closes. But there seems little doubt that this episode never came within the author's experience. It was borrowed from the lips of a fashionable London friend, John Crawford of Errol, who declared that the adventure befell him at an inn between Verviers and Aix-la-Chapelle.

By 15 Nov. Sterne joined Sir James