Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  When I had finished, I turned to take the mule from the man, and thank him–

  But Monsieur le Marquis had walked in–

  CHAPTER 42

  I had now the whole south of France to cross upon my mule at my leisure – for I had left Death far behind me – ‘I have followed many a man through France,’ quoth he, ‘but never at this speed.’

  – Still he followed, and still I fled him, but I fled him cheerfully – and he lagged like one without hope of catching his prey. – Why should I fly him at this rate?

  So I changed the mode of my travelling once more; and, after running so rapid and rattling a course, I flattered my fancy with thinking that I should cross the rich plains of Languedoc upon my mule’s back, as slowly as foot could fall.

  There is nothing more pleasing to a traveller – or more terrible to travel-writers, than a large rich plain; especially if it is without great rivers or bridges, and presents nothing to the eye but one unvaried picture of plenty. For after they have told you that ’tis delicious! or delightful! and that nature pours out her abundance, &c, they have then a large plain upon their hands, which they know not what to do with – and which is of little use to them but to carry them to some town; and that town may be of no more use than as a starting-point for the next plain – and so on.

  This is most terrible work; judge if I don’t manage my plains better.

  CHAPTER 43

  I had not gone above two leagues and a half, before the man with his gun began to look at his priming.

  I had three times loitered terribly behind, half a mile at least every time; once, talking to a drum-maker – I did not understand his craft–

  The second time, I met a couple of Franciscans more short of time than myself, and not being able to get to the bottom of what I was about – I had turned back with them–

  The third time was to trade with a gossip, a basket of Provence figs for four sous; but when the figs were paid for, it turned out that there were two dozen eggs covered with vine-leaves at the bottom of the basket. I had no intention of buying eggs–

  But I wanted the basket – and the gossip wanted to keep it, or she could do nothing with her eggs – and without it I could do nothing with my figs, which were too ripe already, and most of ’em burst at the side: this brought on a short argument, which ended in different proposals about what we should both do.

  – How we disposed of our eggs and figs, I defy you to guess. You will read the whole of it – not this year, for I am hastening to the story of my uncle Toby’s amours – but you will read it in the collection of stories which arose out of the journey across this plain – and which, therefore, I call my

  PLAIN STORIES.

  How fatigued my pen has been in this journey over so barren a track, the world must judge – but the traces of it, which are all vibrating together this moment, tell me ’tis the most fruitful and busy period of my life; for as I had made no agreement with my man with the gun, as to time – by stopping and talking to every soul I met – joining all parties before me – waiting for everyone behind – hailing all kinds of pilgrims, fiddlers and friars – not passing a woman in a mulberry-tree without commending her legs, and tempting her into conversation with a pinch of snuff–

  In short, by seizing every handle which chance held out to me in this journey, I turned my plain into a city. – I was always in company, and as my mule loved society as much as myself, and had some proposals to offer to every beast he met – I am confident we could have passed through London for a month with fewer adventures.

  O! there is that sprightly frankness in the Languedocians that looks like the simplicity which poets sing of in better days. – I will delude my fancy, and believe it is so.

  ’Twas in the road betwixt Nismes and Lunel, where there is the best Muscatto wine in France.

  The sun was set – work was finished; the nymphs had tied up their hair – the men were preparing for a carousal – my mule stopped dead.

  ‘’Tis the fife and tambourine,’ said I.

  ‘I’m frightened to death,’ quoth he. ‘By saint Boogar, I’ll not go a step further.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said I, leaping off his back, and kicking off my boots. ‘I’ll take a dance, – so stay you here.’

  A sun-burnt daughter of Labour rose up from the group to meet me as I advanced; her chestnut hair was tied up in a knot, but for a single tress.

  ‘We want a cavalier,’ said she, holding out her hands.

  ‘And a cavalier ye shall have,’ said I, taking them.

  Hadst thou only, Nannette, been dressed like a duchess! – But that cursed slit in thy petticoat!

  Nannette cared not for it. She led me up by the hand.

  A lame youth with a pipe and a tambourine ran sweetly over the prelude, as he sat upon the bank.

  ‘Tie me up this tress of hair,’ said Nannette, putting a piece of string into my hand . – I forgot I was a stranger. – The knot fell down – we had been seven years acquainted.

  The youth played – and off we bounded.

  The youth’s sister sang like an angel – ’twas a Gascoigne roundelay.

  VIVA LA JOIA!

  FIDON LA TRISTESSA!

  The nymphs joined in, and their swains an octave below them.

  ‘Viva la joia!’ was on Nanette’s lips – and in her eyes. A spark of amity shot across the space betwixt us.

  Why could I not live and end my days thus? why could not a man sit down in the lap of content here – and dance, and sing, and say his prayers, and go to heaven with this nut-brown maid?

  ‘’Tis time to dance off,’ quoth I; so changing partners and tunes, I danced it away from Lunel to Montpellier – from thence to Beziers – through Narbonne and Carcasson, till at last I danced myself into Perdrillo’s pavilion, where pulling out a lined paper, so that I might go straight on, without digression, to my uncle Toby’s amours–

  I began thus–

  BOOK 8

  CHAPTER 1

  – But softly – on these sportive plains, and under this genial sun, where all flesh is running out piping, fiddling, and dancing, I defy – despite all that I have earlier said upon straight lines – I defy the best cabbage planter in existence to go on coolly and critically planting his cabbages in straight lines, without straddling out, or sidling into some bastardly digression.

  – In Freeze-land, or Fog-land, it may be done–

  But in this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every idea gets vent – in this fertile land of chivalry and romance, where I now sit, unscrewing my ink-horn to write my uncle Toby’s amours, with all the meanders of Julia’s track in quest of her Diego in full view of my study window – if thou comest not and takest me by the hand–

  What a work it is likely to turn out!

  Let us begin it.

  CHAPTER 2

  It is with Love as with Cuckoldom–

  But now I am talking of beginning a book, and have long had a thing upon my mind to be told to the reader, which, if not told now, can never be told to him – so I’ll just mention it, and then begin in good earnest.

  The thing is this.

  That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best. I’m sure it is the most religious – for I begin with writing the first sentence – and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

  ’Twould cure an author for ever of all the fuss and folly of opening his street-door, and calling in his neighbours and friends, with the devil and all his imps, just to observe how one sentence of mine follows another, and how the plan follows the whole.

  I wish you saw me half-starting out of my chair; with what confidence I look up – catching the idea sometimes before it reaches me–

  I have no

  Zeal or Anger–

  Anger or Zeal–

  No-one shall ever kindle a worse spark within me, or have an unkinder greeting, than what he w
ill read in the next chapter.

  CHAPTER 3

  – Bonjour! – good morrow! so you have got your cloak on! but ’tis a cold morning – and how goes it with thy concubine, thy wife, and thy little ones o’ both sides? and when did you hear from your sister, aunt, uncle, and cousins? – I hope they have got better of their colds, coughs, claps, toothaches, fevers, sciaticas, swellings, and sore eyes.

  – What a devil of an apothecary! to take so much blood – give such a vile purge – poultice – plaster – clyster – blister! And why so much calomel? and such a dose of opium! – By my great-aunt Dinah’s old black velvet mask! I think there was no need for it.

  Now this Mask being a little bald about the chin, by frequent putting off and on, before she was got with child by the coachman – not one of our family would wear it after. To mend the Mask, was more than the mask was worth – and to wear a bald mask was as bad as having no mask at all.

  This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that in all our numerous family, for four generations, we count no more than one archbishop, a Welsh judge, three or four aldermen, and a single mountebank–

  In the sixteenth century, we boast of no less than a dozen alchemists.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘It is with Love as with Cuckoldom’ – the suffering party is generally the last who knows anything about it: this comes from having half a dozen words for one thing; and so long as what to one man’s breast is Love may be Hatred, in another – or Sentiment or Nonsense – no Madam, not there, I mean the part I am pointing at – how can we help ourselves?

  Of all mortal men who ever soliloquized upon this mystic subject, my uncle Toby was the worst fitted to have pushed his researches through such a trial of feelings; and he would have let them run on, to see how they would turn out – had not Bridget’s telling of them to Susannah, and Susannah’s disclosure to all the world, made it necessary for my uncle Toby to look into the affair.

  CHAPTER 5

  Why weavers, gardeners, and gladiators – or a man with a wasted leg – should ever have had some tender nymph breaking her heart in secret for them, are points well accounted for by ancient and modern physiologists.

  A water-drinker, provided he is a professed one, and does it without fraud, is precisely in the same predicament: not that, at first sight, there is any logic in it, ‘That a rill of cold water dribbling through my inward parts, should light up a torch in my Jenny’s–’

  – It seems to run opposite to the natural workings of causes and effects–

  But it shows the weakness of human reason.

  – ‘And you are in perfect good health? And drink nothing but water?’

  Impetuous fluid! the moment thou pressest against the flood-gates of the brain – see how they give way!

  In swims Curiosity with her damsels – they dive into the centre of the current–

  Fancy sits musing upon the bank, and, watching the stream, turns straws and bulrushes into masts and bowsprits. And Desire, with her vest held up in one hand, snatches at them with the other, as they swim by–

  O ye water-drinkers! is it by this delusive fountain, that ye have so often turned this world around like a mill-wheel – grinding the faces of the impotent – bepeppering their noses, and changing the very face of nature–

  ‘If I was you,’ quoth Yorick, ‘I would drink more water, Eugenius.’

  ‘And, if I was you, Yorick,’ replied Eugenius, ‘so would I.’

  Which shows they had both read Longinus–

  For my own part, I am resolved never to read any book but my own, as long as I live.

  CHAPTER 6

  I wish my uncle Toby had been a water-drinker; for that would have accounted for Widow Wadman feeling something stirring within her in his favour, the first time she saw him. – Something! something.

  – Something perhaps more than friendship – less than love – something – no matter what – no matter where–

  But the truth is, my uncle Toby was not a water-drinker; he drank it neither pure nor mixed, except where better drink was not to be had – or while he was under cure. When the surgeon told him it would extend the fibres, and mend them sooner – my uncle Toby drank it for quietness sake.

  Now as no effect in nature can be produced without a cause, and as my uncle Toby was neither a weaver, a gardener, or a gladiator – unless by that you mean a captain of foot – we can only suppose that my uncle Toby’s leg – but that will not aid us in this hypothesis, unless it proceeded from some ailment in the foot, which it did not – for my uncle Toby’s leg was not emaciated at all. It was a little stiff and awkward, from total disuse for the three years he lay confined at my father’s house; but it was plump and muscular, and in all other respects as good a leg as the other.

  I declare, I do not recollect any time of my life, where my understanding was more at a loss how to torture the chapter I had been writing, to the service of the chapter following it, than in this present case. One would think I enjoyed running into difficulties of this kind, merely to make fresh experiments in getting out of them.

  – Are the distresses of an author not sufficient, Tristram, but thou must entangle thyself still more?

  Is it not enough that thou art in debt, and that thou hast ten cart-loads of thy fifth and sixth volumes still unsold, and art almost at thy wit’s ends, how to get them off thy hands?

  To this hour art thou not tormented with the vile asthma that thou got skating in Flanders? and is it but two months ago, that in a fit of laughter on seeing a cardinal make water like a chorister, with both hands, thou brakest a vessel in thy lungs, and lost two quarts of blood; which is full half a gallon?

  CHAPTER 7

  But for heaven’s sake, let us not talk of quarts or gallons – let us take the story straight before us; it is so intricate a one, it will scarce bear any part being out of place; and, somehow or other, you have got me thrust into the middle of it–

  – I beg we may take more care.

  CHAPTER 8

  My uncle Toby and the corporal had travelled down speedily to take possession of the spot of ground we have spoke of, in order to open their campaign as early as the rest of the allies; but they forgot a most necessary article; not a spade, a pickaxe, or a shovel–

  – It was a bed to lie on. So, as Shandy-Hall was at that time unfurnished, and the little inn where poor Le Fever died was not yet built, my uncle Toby had to accept a bed at Mrs. Wadman’s, for a night or two, till corporal Trim, with the help of a carpenter, constructed one in my uncle Toby’s house.

  A daughter of Eve: such was widow Wadman, and ’tis all the character I intend to give her–

  – ‘That she was a perfect woman’ – had better be fifty leagues off – or in her warm bed – or playing with a case-knife – or anything, rather than make a man the object of her attention, when the house and all the furniture is her own.

  There is no problem out of doors in day-light, where a woman can view a man in more lights than one – but in her house, she cannot see him without mixing something of her own goods and chattels along with him, till he gets foisted into her inventory–

  And then good night.

  CHAPTER 9

  Pray, do not night-shirts differ from day-shirts in this way; that they are so much longer, that when you are laid down in them, they fall almost as far below the feet, as day-shirts fall short of them?

  Widow Wadman’s night-shirts (as was the mode I suppose in Queen Anne’s reign) were cut in this fashion; they were two ells and a half in length; so that allowing a moderate woman two ells, she had half an ell to spare, to do what she would with.

  Now in the many bleak and decemberly nights of a seven years widowhood, this habit had gradually got established in her bed-chamber. – That as soon as Mrs. Wadman was put to bed, and had stretched her legs down to the bottom of it, Bridget, with suitable decorum, having first opened the bed-clothes at the feet, took hold of the spare half-ell of cloth, drew it down, twisted it, pinned
it above the hem, tucked all in tight, and wished her mistress a good night.

  Bridget did this every night; the etiquette was sacred.

  The first night, as soon as the corporal had conducted my uncle Toby upstairs, at about ten, Mrs. Wadman threw herself into her arm-chair, and reclining her cheek upon her hand, she ruminated till midnight.

  The second night she went to her bureau, took out her marriage-settlement, and read it over with great devotion: and the third night (which was the last of my uncle Toby’s stay) when Bridget had pulled down the night-shift, and was trying to stick in the pin–

  – With a kick of both heels she kicked the pin out of her fingers – the etiquette fell to the ground, and was shivered into a thousand atoms.

  From which it was plain that widow Wadman was in love with my uncle Toby.

  CHAPTER 10

  My uncle Toby’s head at that time was full of other matters, so that it was not till the demolition of Dunkirk that he found leisure to return this sentiment.

  This made an armistice (with regard to my uncle Toby – but regarding Mrs. Wadman, a vacancy) of almost eleven years. But in all cases of this nature, it is the second blow, no matter how much later, which makes the fray.

  I choose for that reason to call these the amours of my uncle Toby with Mrs. Wadman, rather than the amours of Mrs. Wadman with my uncle Toby.

  This makes a difference.

  It is not like the affair of an old hat cocked – and a cocked old hat – but there is a difference here in the nature of things–

  And let me tell you, gentry, a wide one too.

  CHAPTER 11

  Now as widow Wadman loved my uncle Toby, and my uncle Toby did not love widow Wadman, there was nothing for widow Wadman to do but to go on loving my uncle Toby – or let it alone.