A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

In the final chapters of A Sentimental Journey, Sterne portrays the variety of life that exists outside of the French city walls. The journey from Paris to Lyon is beset with a visit to a girl who has experienced a great tragedy, a family that welcomes Yorick into their home, and an incident in a roadside inn that interrupts the narrative in a strange and beguiling manner.

The first of these, the visit to Maria, is another tie-in to another Sterne book, Tristram Shandy. Yorick decides to visit her after hearing about her from his friend and, when he arrives, nothing has quite prepared him for Maria. Her grief is palpable, and the effect of her husband’s death almost harrowing, especially considering the levity of the majority of the book. It is one of the occasional interjections of grief which punctuate A Sentimental Journey. Just as with the story of the man and his dead donkey, this interjection of an incredibly sad milieu in the midst of Yorick’s capers helps to sketch a more fully-realized portrait of French society. Sterne’s audience can understand that this is not just a tale of Yorick’s humorous encounters with foppish aristocrats, or of his endless flirtations: there is an emotional depth to be found abroad, one Sterne is keen to portray. These sentiments inform the kind of travel writing Sterne values.

The visit to the farmhouse is a similar occasion. It is neither particularly funny, nor particularly sad, but features a pleasant and unexpected encounter in the middle of the countryside. The title of this chapter–“The Grace”– equivocates the family’s dancing to a form of prayer and thanksgiving, something that is made explicit in the text. When the old man tells Yorick that “a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay” (69), Yorick cannot help but agree that this is also true of “a learned prelate” (69). The people Yorick had taken for fairly simple farmers demonstrate a complex and interesting understanding of religion; just as Yorick argued with Madame de V--- over the importance of faith, this celebration is a similar musing on the intricacies of theology. It is different, but no less complicated and relevant. 

The final chapter contains, in a literary sense, one of the most interesting aspects of A Sentimental Journey. In addition to the farcical situation Yorick finds himself in, his inability to sleep and his inability to conform to the rules leads him to reach out into the darkness and, in the fractured words of the text, catch “hold of the Fille de Chambre’s---” (73). This interruption comes mid-sentence, shattering the audience’s narrative expectations and leaving the text with a cliffhanger moment. The sentence is purposefully ambiguous: the use of the apostrophe could indicate that he is grabbing hold of the Fille de Chambre’s hand or (as in certain editions in which the words “End of Vol. II” are included as part of the text) the implication may be that he is grabbing hold of the Fille de Chambre’s “end.”

In effect, Sterne is creating another mystery. Unfortunately for both Sterne and the reader, it is not one to which he was able to provide a satisfying solution. The author’s death before the completion of the remainder of the story means that the pun, the sentence, and the story of Yorick and La Fleur as they travelled on to Italy will never be truly completed. But this, too, marks Sterne’s work as noticeably different from his contemporaries. This sense of drama and desperation to know what happens next is missing entirely from the dry, factual accounts of writers such as Tobias Smollett. That Sterne could leave a half-completed work and it be celebrated far more than any of Smollett’s detailed, comprehensive travel guides demonstrates the true value of the sentimental approach Yorick outlines earlier in the text.