Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  ‘You excite my curiosity greatly,’ said Yorick.

  ‘For my own part,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘I have given up.’

  ‘The Danes who were on the left at the siege of Limerick,’ quoth corporal Trim, ‘were all auxiliaries.’

  ‘And very good ones,’ said my uncle Toby. ‘But the auxiliaries my brother is talking about, I imagine to be different things.’

  ‘You do?’ said my father, rising up.

  CHAPTER 43

  My father took a turn across the room, sat down, and finished the chapter.

  ‘The auxiliary verbs we are concerned in here,’ he continued, ‘are, am; was; have; had; do; did; make; made; shall; should; will; would; can; could; owe; ought; used; or is wont. And these varied with tenses, present, past, or future, or with these questions added to them – Is it? Was it? Will it be? Would it be? May it be? Might it be? And these again put negatively: Is it not? Was it not? Or chronologically – Has it been always? Lately? How long ago? Or hypothetically: If it was? If it was not? – if the French should beat the English? If the Sun should go out of the Zodiac?

  ‘Now, by the right use of these,’ continued my father, ‘no idea can enter a child’s brain, without a crowd of ideas being drawn forth from it. – Didst thou ever see a white bear?’ he cried, turning to Trim.

  ‘No, your honour,’ replied the corporal.

  ‘But thou couldst talk about one, Trim,’ said my father, ‘if needed?

  ‘How is it possible, brother,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘if the corporal never saw one?’

  ‘That is the fact I want,’ replied my father. ‘The possibility of it is as follows.

  ‘A White Bear! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one?

  ‘Would I had seen a white bear!

  ‘If I should see a white bear, what would I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?

  ‘If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted? – described? Have I never dreamed of one?

  ‘Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave?

  ‘How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth?

  ‘Is the white bear worth seeing?

  ‘Is there no sin in it?

  ‘Is it better than a black one?’

  BOOK 6

  CHAPTER 1

  We’ll not stop two moments, my dear Sir, – only, as we have got through five volumes, (do, Sir, sit down upon a set – they are better than nothing) let us just look back upon the country we have passed through.

  – What a wilderness has it been! and what a mercy that we have not been lost in it!

  Did you think the world contained so many Jack Asses? How they viewed and reviewed us as we passed over the bottom of that little valley! and when we climbed that hill, and were just getting out of sight – good God! what a braying did they all set up!

  Prithee, shepherd! who keeps all those Jack Asses?

  * * *

  What! are they never groomed? Never taken in in winter? Bray – bray, bray on – louder still – that’s nothing. Was I a Jack Ass, I solemnly declare, I would bray from morning until night.

  CHAPTER 2

  When my father had danced his white bear backwards and forwards through half a dozen pages, he closed the book, and handed it triumphantly to Trim.

  ‘Tristram,’ said he, ‘shall be made to conjugate every word in the dictionary, backwards and forwards. By this means, you see, Yorick, every word is converted into a thesis or proposition; and each proposition leads the mind on into fresh enquiries. The force of this engine is incredible in opening a child’s head.’

  ‘’Tis enough, brother Shandy,’ cried my uncle Toby, ‘to burst it into a thousand splinters.’

  ‘I presume,’ said Yorick, smiling, ‘it must be owing to this that the famous Vincent Quirino was able, in his eighth year, to paste up in the public schools at Rome no less than four thousand five hundred different theses, upon the most obscure points of theology; and to defend them well enough to dumbfound his opponents.’

  ‘What is that,’ cried my father, ‘to Alphonsus Tostatus, who, almost in his nurse’s arms, learned all the sciences and arts without being taught any one of them? – And what shall we say of the great Piereskius?’

  ‘That’s the very man,’ cried my uncle Toby, ‘who walked five hundred miles from Paris to Shevling and back again, merely to see Stevinus’s flying chariot. – He was a very great man!’ added my uncle (meaning Stevinus).

  ‘He was,’ said my father (meaning Piereskius); ‘and increased his knowledge so greatly, that it is said that when he was seven years of age, his father committed entirely to his care the education of his younger brother, a boy of five.’

  ‘Was the father as wise as the son?’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘I should think not,’ said Yorick.

  ‘But what are these,’ continued my father, in a fit of enthusiasm, ‘to those prodigies of childhood, Grotius, Scioppius, Heinsius, Pascal, Ferdinand de Cordouè, and others? Some went through their classics at seven; others wrote tragedies at eight; Ferdinand de Cordouè was so wise at nine, and gave such proofs of his knowledge and goodness, that the monks imagined he was Antichrist. – Others were masters of fourteen languages at ten, finished studying rhetoric, poetry, logic, and ethics, at eleven, wrote commentaries upon Servius at twelve, and at thirteen received their degrees.’

  ‘But you forget the great Lipsius,’ quoth Yorick, ‘who composed a work* the day he was born.’

  ‘They should have wiped it up,’ said my uncle Toby, ‘and said no more about it.’

  * However, Baillet says that to understand how Lipsius composed a book on the first day of his life, one must imagine, that this first day is not that of his birth, but that on which he began to use reason; this would have been at the age of nine years; and we are persuaded that it was at this age that Lipsius composed a poem.

  CHAPTER 3

  When Dr Slop’s cataplasm, or poultice, was ready, an untimely scruple of decorum made Susannah refuse to hold the candle, whilst Slop put the cataplasm on. Slop had not given Susannah any pain relief for her distemper, and so a quarrel had strung up betwixt them.

  ‘Oh!’ said Slop, casting a glance at Susannah; ‘then, I think I know you, madam.’

  ‘You know me, Sir!’ cried Susannah fastidiously, with a toss of her head.

  Doctor Slop clapped his finger and his thumb instantly upon his nostrils.

  Susannah was ready to burst with anger. ‘’Tis false,’ she said.

  ‘Come, come, Mrs. Modesty,’ said Slop, somewhat elated with his success, ‘if you won’t hold the candle and look – hold it and shut your eyes.’

  ‘That’s one of your popish shifts,’ cried Susannah.

  ‘’Tis better,’ said Slop, ‘than no shift at all, young woman.’

  ‘I defy you, Sir,’ cried Susannah, pulling her shift sleeve into sight below her elbow.

  It was almost impossible for two persons to assist each other in a surgical case with more bad-tempered cordiality.

  Slop snatched up the cataplasm; Susannah snatched up the candle.

  ‘This way,’ said Slop. Susannah, looking one way, and moving another, instantly set fire to Slop’s wig, which being somewhat bushy and greasy, burnt out before it was well kindled.

  ‘You impudent whore!’ cried Slop, straightening up with the cataplasm in his hand.

  ‘I never destroyed anybody’s nose,’ said Susannah, ‘which is more than you can say!’

  ‘Is it?’ cried Slop, throwing the cataplasm in her face.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ cried Susannah, returning the compliment with what was left in the pan.

  CHAPTER 4

  After this, as the cataplasm had failed, Dr. Slop and Susannah retired in
to the kitchen to prepare a fomentation for me; and meanwhile, my father decided the point as you will read.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘You see ’tis high time,’ said my father to my uncle Toby and Yorick, ‘to take this young creature out of these women’s hands, and put him into those of a private tutor. Marcus Antoninus had fourteen tutors at once to superintend his son Commodus’s education, and in six weeks he dismissed five of them. I think that those five whom he dismissed did Commodus’s temper, in that short time, more hurt than the other nine were able to rectify all their lives long.

  ‘Now, when I consider the person who is to teach my son as the mirror in which my son will view himself from morning to night, and by which he is to adjust his looks, his demeanour, and perhaps the inmost sentiments of his heart; – I would like one, Yorick, polished at all points, fit for my child to look into.’

  ‘This is very good sense,’ quoth my uncle Toby to himself.

  ‘There is,’ continued my father, ‘a certain mien and motion of the body, both in acting and speaking, which denotes a man is good within; and I am not surprised that Gregory of Nazianzum, upon observing the hasty gestures of Julian, should foretell he would one day become a heretic; or that St. Ambrose should turn his assistant out of doors, because of an indecent motion of his head, which went backwards and forwards like a flail. There are a thousand unnoticed openings which let a penetrating eye into a man’s soul; and I maintain that a man does not so much as lay down his hat without revealing something of his nature.

  ‘For these reasons, the tutor I choose shall neither lisp, squint, or wink, or talk loud, or look fierce, or foolish; – or bite his lips, or grind his teeth, or speak through his nose, or pick it, or blow it with his fingers.

  ‘He shall neither walk fast, or slow, nor fold his arms, or hang them down, or hide them in his pocket.

  ‘He shall neither strike, or pinch, or tickle; or bite, or cut his nails, or hawk, or spit, or sniff, or drum his feet or fingers in company; nor (according to Erasmus) shall he speak to any one in urinating, nor point to carrion or excrement.’

  ‘Now this is all nonsense again,’ quoth my uncle Toby to himself.

  ‘I will have him,’ continued my father, ‘cheerful and jovial; at the same time, prudent, vigilant, acute, inventive, quick in resolving doubts; – he shall be wise, judicious, and learned.’

  ‘And why not humble, and moderate, and gentle-tempered and good?’ said Yorick.

  ‘And why not,’ cried my uncle Toby, ‘generous, and bountiful, and brave?’

  ‘He shall be, my dear Toby,’ replied my father, getting up to shake his hand.

  ‘Then, brother Shandy,’ answered my uncle, ‘I humbly beg to recommend poor Le Fever’s son to you.’ A tear of joy sparkled in my uncle Toby’s eye, and another in the corporal’s, as the proposition was made – you will see why when you read Le Fever’s story. – Fool that I am! I cannot recollect what it was that hindered me from letting the corporal tell it in his own words; but I must tell it now in my own.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE STORY OF LE FEVER

  It was in the summer of that year in which Dendermond was taken by the allies, which was about seven years after my uncle Toby and Trim had gone into the country to lay siege upon the bowling-green to some of the finest fortified cities in Europe.

  My uncle Toby was one evening at home having his supper, with Trim sitting behind him – for in consideration of the corporal’s lame and painful knee, when my uncle Toby dined, he would never allow the corporal to stand; and the poor fellow’s veneration for his master was such that my uncle Toby had some trouble in maintaining this point; for often he would look back and see the corporal standing behind him with the most dutiful respect: this bred more little squabbles betwixt them, than all other causes in five-and-twenty years–

  But this is neither here nor there. Why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me – I govern not it.

  He was one evening sitting thus at his supper, when the landlord of a little inn in the village came into the parlour, with an empty phial in his hand, to beg a glass of sherry.

  ‘’Tis for a poor gentleman – I think, of the army,’ said the landlord, ‘who was taken ill at my house four days ago, and has had no desire to taste anything, till just now, when he took a fancy for a glass of sherry and thin toast. If I could not beg it, I would almost steal it for the poor gentleman, he is so ill. We are all of us concerned for him.’

  ‘Thou art a good-natured soul,’ cried my uncle Toby; ‘and thou shalt drink the poor gentleman’s health in a glass thyself: take a couple of bottles, and tell him he is heartily welcome to them, and to a dozen more if they will do him good.’

  As the landlord shut the door, my uncle said to Trim: ‘I am sure he is a very compassionate fellow, Trim – yet I cannot help thinking that there must be something uncommon in his guest, too, to make the landlord and his family care so much for him. Step after him, Trim, do; and ask if he knows his name.’

  ‘I have quite forgot it, truly,’ said the landlord, on returning with the corporal, ‘but I can ask his son. He has a boy of eleven or twelve years of age; – but the poor creature has eaten as little as his father; he does nothing but mourn for him, and has not stirred from the bedside these two days.’

  My uncle Toby laid down his knife and fork, and thrust his plate away. Trim brought him his pipe and tobacco.

  ‘Stay a little,’ said my uncle Toby, lighting his pipe. After he had smoked about a dozen whiffs, he said,

  ‘Trim! As it is a bad night, I am thinking of wrapping myself up in my cloak, and paying a visit to this poor gentleman.’

  ‘Your honour has not worn your cloak,’ replied the corporal, ‘since the night before your honour received your wound; and it is so cold and rainy a night, that even with the cloak, ’twill bring on your honour’s torment in your groin.’

  ‘I fear so,’ replied my uncle Toby; ‘but I am not at rest in my mind, Trim, since the landlord’s account.’

  ‘Leave it to me, your honour,’ quoth the corporal. ‘I’ll go to the house and reconnoitre, and act accordingly; and I will bring your honour a full account in an hour.’

  ‘Go, Trim,’ said my uncle; ‘here’s a shilling for thee to drink with his servant.’

  ‘I shall get it all out of him,’ said the corporal, shutting the door.

  My uncle Toby filled his second pipe; and apart from wondering whether a fortified outwork was as well in a straight line, as a crooked one, – he might be said to have thought of nothing but poor Le Fever and his boy the whole time he smoked it.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE STORY OF LE FEVER CONTINUED

  It was not till my uncle Toby had knocked the ashes out of his third pipe, that corporal Trim returned from the inn, and gave him this account.

  ‘I despaired, at first,’ said the corporal, ‘of getting any news of the poor sick lieutenant.’

  ‘He is in the army, then?’ said my uncle Toby. ‘In what regiment?’

  ‘I’ll tell your honour everything as I learnt it,’ replied the corporal.

  ‘Then, Trim, I’ll fill another pipe,’ said my uncle Toby, ‘and not interrupt thee; so sit down in the window-seat, Trim, and begin thy story again.’

  The corporal bowed, sat down, and began again.

  ‘I despaired at first,’ said he, ‘of getting any news of the lieutenant and his son; for when I asked where his servant was, from whom I could make enquiries, I was told that he had no servant with him; that he had come to the inn with hired horses.

  ‘“If I get better, my dear,” said he, giving his purse to his son to pay the man, “we can hire horses again.”

  ‘“But alas! the poor gentleman will never leave here,” said the landlady to me, “for I heard the death-watch all night long; and when he dies, his son will certainly die too, for he is broken-hearted.”

  ‘I was hearing this account,’ continued the corporal, ‘when the youth came into the kitchen, to order thin
toast for his father – “but I will make it myself,” said the youth.

  ‘“Pray let me save you the trouble,” said I.

  ‘“I believe, Sir,” said he, very modestly, “I can please him best myself.”

  ‘”I am sure,” said I, “he will not like the toast the worse for being toasted by an old soldier.” The youth took hold of my hand, and burst into tears.’

  ‘Poor boy!’ said my uncle Toby. ‘The name of a soldier, Trim, sounded like the name of a friend; I wish I had him here.’

  ‘I was near weeping myself,’ continued the corporal. ‘When I gave him the toast, I thought it was proper to tell him I was captain Shandy’s servant, and that your honour (though a stranger) was extremely concerned for his father; and that if there was any food or drink we could provide, he was heartily welcome to it. He made a low bow and went up stairs with the toast.

  ‘“I warrant you, my dear,” said I, “your father will be well again.” Mr. Yorick’s curate was smoking a pipe by the kitchen fire, but said not a word to comfort the youth. – I thought it wrong.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘When the lieutenant had taken his sherry and toast, he revived a little, and sent word to the kitchen that he should be glad if I would step upstairs in ten minutes.

  ‘“I believe,” said the landlord, “he is going to say his prayers – for there was a book by his bed-side, and as I shut the door, I saw his son take up a cushion.”

  ‘“I thought,” said the curate, “that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. Trim, never said your prayers at all.”

  ‘“I heard the poor gentleman say his prayers last night,” said the landlady, “very devoutly.”

  ‘“Are you sure?” said the curate.

  ‘“A soldier, an’ please your reverence,” said I, “prays as often as a parson; and when he is fighting for his king, and for his own life and his honour too, he has the most reason to pray to God of anyone in the world.”’

  ‘’Twas well said, Trim,” said my uncle Toby.

  ‘“But when a soldier,” said I, “has been standing for twelve hours in the trenches, up to his knees in cold water, – or engaged for months in long and dangerous marches; resting one night upon his arms, and roused the next in his shirt: harassed and benumbed, with no straw to kneel on – he must say his prayers how and when he can. I believe,” said I, for I was annoyed, “I believe, your reverence, that when a soldier gets time, he prays as heartily as a parson, though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy.”’