known, and the firm
of Becket & De Hondt had taken the place of Dodsley. Sterne hoped by
the end of the year to be free to depart from England, and already he
had made all arrangements with his ecclesiastical superiors for the
necessary leave of absence. He seems to have been treated with all
consideration in the matter. His Archbishop, on being applied to, at
once excused him from parochial work for a year, and promised, if
it should be necessary, to double that term. Fortified with this
permission, Sterne bade farewell to his wife and daughter, and betook
himself to London, with his now completed volumes, at the setting in
of the winter. On the 21st of December they made their appearance, and
in about three weeks from that date their author left England,
with the intention of wintering in the South of France. There were
difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which had first to be
faced--a pecuniary difficulty, which Garrick met by a loan of 20L.,
and a political difficulty, for the removal of which Sterne had to
employ the good offices of new acquaintance later on. He reached Paris
about the 17th of January, 1762, and there met with a reception
which interposed, as might have been expected, the most effectual of
obstacles to his further progress southward. He was received in Paris
with open arms, and stepped at once within the charmed circle of the
philosophic _salons_. Again was the old intoxicating cup presented to
his lips--this time, too, with more dexterous than English hands--and
again did he drink deeply of it. "My head is turned," he writes to
Garrick, "with what I see, and the unexpected honour I have met with
here. _Tristram_ was almost as much known here as in London, at least
among your men of condition and learning, and has got me introduced
into so many circles ('tis _comme a Londres_) I have just now a
fortnight's dinners and suppers on my hands." We may venture to doubt
whether French politeness had not been in one respect taken somewhat
too seriously by the flattered Englishman, and whether it was much
more than the name and general reputation of _Tristram_, which was
"almost as much known" in Paris as in London. The dinners and suppers,
however, were, at any rate, no figures of speech, but very liberal
entertainments, at which Sterne appears to have disported himself with
all his usual unclerical _abandon_. "I Shandy it away," he writes in
his boyish fashion to Garrick, "fifty times more than