after his wife as I have been.  After having sought her in five or six different towns, I found her at last in Franche Comte.  Poor woman!” he adds, “she was very cordial, &c.”  The &c. is charming.  But her cordiality had evidently no tendency to deepen into any more impassioned sentiment, for she “begged to stay another year or so.”  As to “my Lydia”—­the real cause, we must suspect, of Sterne’s having turned out of his road—­she, he says, “pleases me much.  I found her greatly improved in everything I wished her.”  As to himself:  “I am most unaccountably well, and most accountably nonsensical.  ’Tis at least a proof of good spirits, which is a sign and token, in these latter days, that I must take up my pen.  In faith, I think I shall die with it in my hand; but I shall live these ten years, my Antony, notwithstanding the fears of my wife, whom I left most melancholy on that account.”  The “fears” and the melancholy were, alas! to be justified, rather than the “good spirits;” and the shears of Atropos were to close, not in ten years, but in little more than twenty months, upon that fragile thread of life.

[Footnote 1:  It was on this tour that Sterne picked up the French valet Lafleur, whom he introduced as a character into the Sentimental Journey, but whose subsequently published recollections of the tour (if, indeed, the veritable Lafleur was the author of the notes from which Scott quotes so freely) appear, as Mr. Fitzgerald has pointed out, from internal evidence to be mostly fictitious.]

By the end of June he was back again in his Yorkshire home, and very soon after had settled down to work upon the ninth and last volume of Tristram Shandy.  He was writing, however, as it should seem, under something more than the usual distractions of a man with two establishments.  Mrs. Sterne was just then ill at Marseilles, and her husband—­who, to do him justice, was always properly solicitous for her material comfort—­was busy making provision for her to change her quarters to Chalons.  He writes to M. Panchaud, at Paris, sending fifty pounds, and begging him to make her all further advances that might be necessary.  “I have,” he says, “such entire confidence in my wife that she spends as little as she can, though she is confined to no particular sum ... and you may rely—­in case she should draw for fifty or a hundred pounds extraordinary—­that it and every demand shall be punctually paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole Shandian family are ready to stand security.”  Later on, too, he writes that “a young nobleman is now inaugurating a jaunt with me for six weeks, about Christmas, to the Faubourg St. Germain;” and he adds—­in a tone the sincerity of which he would himself have probably found a difficulty in gauging—­“if my wife should grow worse (having had a very poor account of her in my daughter’s last), I cannot think of her being without me; and, however expensive the journey would be, I would fly to Avignon to administer consolation to her and my poor girl.[1]”