Fricassée in France
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
1768
King George III 1760-1820
An Englishman at Paris in 1767.
‘An Englishman at Paris, 1767’ by James Bretherton (?1730-1806), after William Henry Bunbury (1750-1811), published in 1782. It shows a hearty Englishman newly arrived in the French capital, wearing a heavy blue overcoat and a tricorn hat and accompanied by a small, thick-set boy. The Parisians look on scornfully. To left is a hairdresser with a contemptuous expression. The gentleman in the carriage is laughing, his driver is laughing, a common fellow (on the right) is laughing, a friar cannot hide a grin; even the dogs are ashamed to look. It was a sensitive time for foreign travel: The Seven Years’ War had ended in 1763 with Britain helping herself to most of France’s colonial possessions in India, the Caribbean and North America. Continental attitudes to the English were unchanged by Charles Dickens’s day: see Exit Lord Pudding.
Introduction
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.
THEY order, said I, this matter better in France.
— You have been in France? said my gentleman, turning quick upon me with the most civil triumph in the world.
— Strange! quoth I, debating the matter with myself. That one and twenty miles sailing, for ’tis absolutely no further from Dover to Calais, should give a man these rights — I’ll look into them: so giving up the argument — I went straight to my lodgings, put up half a dozen shirts and a black pair of silk breeches — “the coat I have on,” said I, looking at the sleeve, “will do” — took a place in the Dover stage; and the packet* sailing at nine the next morning — by three I had got sat down to my dinner upon a fricaseed chicken, so incontestibly in France, that had I died that night of an indigestion, the whole world could not have suspended the effects of the Droits D’aubaine* — my shirts, and black pair of silk breeches — port-manteau and all must have gone to the King of France* — even the little picture which I have so long worn, and so often have told thee, Eliza,* I would carry with me into my grave, would have been torn from my neck. — Ungenerous! — to seize upon the wreck of an unwary passenger, whom your subjects had beckon’d to their coast — by heaven! Sire, it is not well done; and much does it grieve me, ’tis the monarch of a people so civilized and courteous, and so renowned for sentiment and fine feelings, that I have to reason with —
But I have scarce set foot in your dominions.
From ‘A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy’ (1768) by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).
* A packet in this case is a ship running regularly between two points, typically for the delivery of mail.
* The droits d’aubaine were an old feudal custom which gave the authorities the absolute right to inherit the property of any foreigner who died on French soil, regardless of any will he might make or the claims of any relatives. It was abolished at the Revolution, reinstated by Napoleon, and abolished again in 1819. We deduce that Mr Yorick was not a Scotsman: the Swiss, Savoyards, Scots and Portuguese were all exempt from the law.
* The King of France at this time was Louis XV, who reigned from 1715 to 1774.
* A reference to Eliza Draper, whom Sterne met in 1767. Eliza captivated Sterne, a bachelor, but she was already the wife of an official in the East India Company. They exchanged miniatures, and entered into a friendly correspondence thereafter; but after only three months of friendship Eliza was called away to India, and they never met again. Sterne made no attempt to conceal the connection, and Eliza became Mr Yorick’s love interest.
