I first read A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy fifteen years ago when I was going through my first flush of eighteenth century novels. Seeing as I read, Tristram Shandy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson and London Journal, The Vicar of Wakefield and Fanny Hill, I found A Sentimental Journey to be so-so. I remarked that while it didn’t frustrate me as Tristram Shandy did, nor did it delight me as much. I also noted that the comedy servant, Fleur, didn’t do much comedy-servanting.
It tells the story of Parson Yorick from Tristram Shandy, who is challenged when he describes something being organised better in France. Realising he’s never actually been, he immediately pops across to Calais, has a little wander about, stays in Paris for a couple of months and makes plans to move on to Italy. Then Laurence Sterne died, rendering the title inaccurate. The book has a really weird relationship with Tristram Shandy, as one of the most famous pages of that book is the black page mourning Yorick’s death, yet Yorick also has the last line in the book. In this, Yorick talks about his parishioner, Walter and mourns the death of Uncle Toby - which means it slots between some parts of Tristram Shandy and not others (which probably says more about that book than any other).
Yorick is not a typical traveller, he’s not after tourist destinations, he’s after sensations and emotions under the catch-all term of ‘sentiment’. These aren’t just how he feels about things, but also the physical effects. On arriving in Calais he gets himself a bottle of cheap plonk and drinks it. This gives him a warm generosity of spirit where he forgives the King of France for a rule where, if he died in the country, he items go towards the crown. As well as this generosity of spirit, he feels a rush of blood to his face and head, a sense of muffled warmth - the physical effects of the alcohol as well as the emotional.
It’s as he is congratulating himself on his feeling of generosity that a monk enters the room, looking for alms. He suddenly finds that whilst he is a big-hearted, giving sort of person who’d share his last penny with a penniless scamp, he doesn’t want to give money to the monk. In fact, he’s angry with the monk for asking him for money and tells him out-right. However, it’s then he sees a beautiful woman and he sees the monk speaking to her. He imagines how the monk is telling her how rude he is and that the woman will think less of him so his attitude to the monk changes and he goes to make up with the monk. In making up, he and the monk swap snuff boxes - his is a fine tortoiseshell number and the monk’s is a cheap horn one. It actually turns out that the woman doesn’t care about what the monk says about Yorick and he’s wasted his time and snuff box to impress her but from then on, the sight of his new horn snuff box remind him to try and be more open and generous.
All this to-do in Calais about monks, beautiful women and snuff boxes takes an hour in Yorick’s life but fifty pages in the book. It’s a book with an odd relationship with time, speeding up and slowing down as later, in Paris, there’s a time skip of a month. It’s because the book measures time by the sentiment created and merely wandering around Paris for a while doesn’t feed this need.
The big drama in Paris is to do with his passport. In his rush to leave England and explore the continent, he forgot that France and England are at war. He even joked with a friend that being imprisoned over the channel would save him money in the long run. At first he tries to minimise the problem, not looking at it squarely in the face but an encounter with a starling in a cage brings his mind back to it. Now imagining what the truth of imprisonment might be, he’s prepared to be as obsequious and fawning as possible to get his passport. He even plays on his famous surname (and possible ancestor) to get onboard with a Shakespeare-loving, French aristo. He doesn’t even kick back at the aristo’s assumption that he is, himself, a jester, admitting that he does jest, though nobody pays him for it.
The aristo even has ideas of why Yorick is in France, sniggering that he has come not to spy out the nakedness of the land; but the people. Yorick responds in spluttering disbelief, saying that he has too much respect for women and that he “conceives every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the transfiguration of Raphael itself.” He’s trying to say he wants to see what’s in people’s hearts but this sets the aristo sniggering again.
This is another theme in the book. It just so happens that Yorick’s innocent misunderstandings always lead to implied sex, or almost-sex. He may be innocently buying some material, doing the door dance with a woman, sharing a carriage or taking her pulse but so many of his behaviours lead to him being near, or alone with, beautiful women. At the end of the book, due to a classic eighteenth century inn mixup, he finds himself grabbing the fille de chambrés…end of volume two. That interruption during the action is typical of the book, if Tristram Shandy is a novel with impotence being a guy theme, A Sentimental Journey’s main organising principal is the coitus interruptus. This is exacerbated by Sterne’s death interrupting the book half way through.
The version I read this time was the Shandy Hall one with illustrations by Martin Rowson. These are brilliant, wonderfully striking pictures with Yorick always being accompanied by an angel and demon on each shoulder, reacting events. The only thing is, given Rowson’s style, Yorick and all the other characters are depicted as extremely ugly. Yorick is illustrated as a thin, cadaverous man who also manages to have multiple chins, and an almost sharklike set of teeth. The tone of the book is light and faux-innocent but the tone of the illustrations are of ugly lechery.
I can see why A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy didn’t grab me as much as the other books I read that decisive year, and I do find it a less exciting book than Tristram Shandy but it is still full of fun double-entendres, silly scenarios and an open acceptance of humanity, faults and all. The comic servant didn’t have much of a chance to comic servant though.
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