I was ever wont,
talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in all your days,
and to all sorts of people. 'Qui le diable est cet homme-la?' said
Choiseul, t'other day, 'ce Chevalier Shandy?'" [We might be listening
to one of Thackeray's Irish heroes.] "You'll think me as vain as a
devil was I to tell you the rest of the dialogue." But there were
distinguished Frenchmen who were ready to render to the English author
more important services than that of offering him hospitality and
flattery. Peace had not been formally concluded between France and
England, and the passport with which Sterne had been graciously
furnished by Pitt was not of force enough to dispense him from making
special application to the French Government for permission to remain
in the country. In this request he was influentially backed. "My
application," he writes, "to the Count de Choiseul goes on swimmingly,
for not only M. Pelletiere (who by-the-bye sends ten thousand
civilities to you and Mrs. G.) has undertaken my affair, but the Count
de Limbourg. The Baron d'Holbach has offered any security for the
inoffensiveness of my behaviour in France--'tis more, you rogue! than
you will do." And then the orthodox, or professedly orthodox, English
divine, goes on to describe the character and habits of his strange
new friend: "This Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here, the
great protector of wits and of the _savans_ who are no wits; keeps
open house three days a week--his house is now, as yours was to me, my
own--he lives at great expense." Equally communicative is he as to his
other great acquaintances. Among these were the Count de Bissie, whom
by an "odd incident" (as it seemed to his unsuspecting vanity) "I
found reading _Tristram_ when I was introduced to him, which I was,"
he adds (without perceiving the connexion between this fact and the
"incident"), "at his desire;" Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards
the Lord Macartney of Chinese celebrity), and the Duke of Orleans (not
yet Egalite) himself, "who has suffered my portrait to be added to the
number of some odd men in his collection, and has had it taken most
expressively at full length by a gentleman who lives with him." Nor
was it only in the delights of society that Sterne was now revelling.
He was passionately fond of the theatre, and his letters to
Garrick are full of eager criticism of the great French performers,
intermingled with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied than