Page:The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy (Volume 1).pdf/111

 'Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen's seats, he would ask, with some emotion, as he walked a-cross the room, "throughout so many delicious provinces in France? Whence is it that the few remaining Chateaus amongst them are so dismantled,—so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a condition?—Because, Sir, (he would say) "in that kingdom no man has any country-interest to support;—the little interest of any kind, which any man has any where in it, is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the Grand Monarch; by the sun-shine of whose countenance, or the clouds which pass a-cross it, every French man lives or dies."

Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard against