difficulties, however, of more kinds than one which had first to be
faced--a pecuniary difficulty, which Garrick met by a loan of 20£.,
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 à 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 I was ever wont,
talk more nonsense than ever you heard me talk in all your days,
and to all sorts of people. 'Qui le diable est cet homme-là?' said
Choiseul, t'other day, 'ce Chevalier Shandy?'" [We might be listening
to one of Thackeray's Irish heroes.] "You'll think me as vain as a
devil was I to tell you the rest of the dialogue." But there were
distinguished Frenchmen who were ready to render to the English author