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“Feel it, said she, holding out her arm”—Laurence Sterne[1]

“Mon divin Coeur est si passionné d’amour pour les hommes, que, ne pouvant plus contenir en lui–même les flammes de son ardente charité, il faut qu’il les répande par ton moyen”—Sainte Marguerite–Marie Alacoque[2]

“the heart; which noble part, and indeed kind of first mover, is a simple and well varied figure”—William Hogarth[3]

“A counted number of pulses only is given to us … our one choice lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time”—Walter Pater[4]

“Anyone who attends academic talks has learned to expect the inevitable question: ‘But what about power?’ Perhaps it is time to start asking different questions: ‘But what about love?’”[5] So writes Rita Felski in her recent book, The Limits of Critique (2015). She wonders, “Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage?”[6] She identifies and condemns her own habitual bias, which is (she insists) that of her whole cohort: “like tenacious bloodhounds, we sniff out coercion, collusion, or exclusion at every turn … the smartest thing you can do is see through the deep–seated convictions and heartfelt attachments of others.”[7] The busy dog pack of Felski’s simile can have little ambition other than to maim its bleeding quarry. As for the heart—the blood–soaked organ that rhythmically refreshes the farthest reaches of our vascular system—what a given writer or reader professes to feel in its name provokes, these days, the predictable unleashing of, in Felski’s words, a “quite stable repertoire of stories, similes, tropes, verbal gambits, and rhetorical ploys.”[8]

In a Felskian spirit, I offer a new way of reading the pulse–taking scene in Laurence Sterne’s 1768 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. I generally assume and hope to demonstrate, when necessary, that Sterne’s irony is so sophisticated as, often, to out–manoeuvre posterity’s proficient bloodhounds. For at least the length of this paper, let me grant Yorick, Sterne’s self–mocking narrator, whether he smiles or he smirks, a passport to range beyond the limits of critique. In Sterne’s case, to emphasize love over power according to Felski’s prescription is not, by any means, to forsake intellection because his style sustains—improvises—the paradox of a sincere ironism or ironized candour. But anyone looking at Tristram Shandy (1760–67), and comparing it with A Sentimental Journey (1767–68), will notice in the later text the much–increased frequency with which Sterne deploys the figure of the heart. When, in the thirty–third and thirty–fourth chapters of the first volume of A Sentimental Journey, Yorick counts the handsome Parisian shopgirl’s pulse, palpating her wrist, Sterne fuses three of his book’s most favoured metonymies, each crucial to his exploration of sentiment and faith. These are not just the heart but also the hand and the blood. For Yorick, interpreting a woman’s pulse is a deed at once of communion and translation. Protestantism and Catholicism meet intimately—and diverge—in Yorick’s diagnosis of that at once empirical and sacred bodily part: the heart.

Sterne probes the throbbing distinction with inextricable pathos, appetite, satire, and self-satire. Most importantly for the present argument, as an Anglican cleric who sojourned in Italy, Sterne may have familiarized himself with the controversial, burgeoning cult of the Sacred Heart, enriching his travelogue’s well-known reconnaissance of sensibility with a Catholic set of connotations, topical in his time and forgotten by us, his modern-day readers. Sterne’s “Journal to Eliza,” undertaken contemporaneously with A Sentimental Journey (1767–68), offers corroborative parallels to support this reading of the pulse-taking scene and its possible link to aspects of the devotion associated, most closely, with St. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.

Accidents of Bread and Wine

Three of the four Evangelists concur in the Gospels on the meaning that Christ imposes on bread and wine at the Last Supper. In the words of the King James Bible, with which Sterne as parson would be closely familiar, St. Matthew tells us, “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”[9] St. Luke adds, “this do in remembrance of me.”[10] An Anglican clergyman abroad in France, Sterne’s narrator, Yorick, continually confronts the practices and assumptions of a Catholic society. He must parse what is, to him, an at least somewhat alienated Christian practice most plainly when, at the outset of his French adventures, he exchanges snuff-boxes with the Franciscan Father Lorenzo, who, interestingly, shares a proper name with Sterne the author, albeit an Italianized variant and thus already a little estranged or translated from Sterne’s perspective. The faiths differ in their understanding of the Eucharist, otherwise known as Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper. Appealing primarily to the arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent (1545–63) affirmed for Catholics the doctrine of transubstantiation: namely, that during the celebration of the Eucharist, the entire substance of the bread and wine undergoes conversion into the whole substance of the body and blood of Christ. Only the accidents of bread and wine remain. Aquinas states without equivocation in his Summa Theologiae, “dicendum quod omnino necesse est confiteri secundum fidem Catholicam quod totus Christus sit in hoc sacramento,” or “It must be affirmed that the Catholic faith necessarily acknowledges that Christ complete exists in this sacrament.”[11] Even the closest Protestant cousins to Catholics—Anglicans—have, since Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), dissented from transubstantiation, construing communion instead as symbolic, though still a numinous act: an instance of allegory, not a miracle contra Naturam. The rival theologies supply their adherents with competing translations of Christ’s intent.

Sterne frames his A Sentimental Journey, however, not just in the form of an itinerant Anglican divine’s adventures in a Catholic society. Yorick is also ailing—dying—coughing up his heart’s blood (Tristram Shandy records his death). As he writes the book, Sterne himself is both hemorrhaging and being bled by physicians. Confiding in Elizabeth (“Eliza”) Draper on April 21, 1767, for example, Sterne informs her how “I half bled to death in bed before I felt it.”[12] Yorick’s narration is valedictory and, with death always in view, eschatological in the root sense of the adjective: a last discourse, a quest on the part of a believer to refute the doctrine of materialism, the mortal foe to his belief system, altogether regardless of sectarian division. In fact, the internecine Christian quarrel over transubstantiation has some affinities with the dispute between Christians as such and materialists. At the centre of the debate is the nature of blood and body. Yorick wants to prove materialism inadequate. The pulse-taking scene in Paris is conceivably a waystation on this progress.[13] His quest seems to culminate, not without powerful crosscurrents of irony, in a scene set near Moulines.

There, Yorick and Maria, the distraite, mingle their tears in one sodden handkerchief—tears being a sublimated, alembicated, intellectualized sort of blood. In his “Journal to Eliza,” Sterne sometimes merges blood and tears—as though the disparate bodily fluids comprised dimensions of a single, intimate, and vital essence, mixed, even, as occasion offers, with the ink of Sterne’s epistolary amour de loin: “I was ill the last time I wrote to you … in ten minutes after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-spun frame of Yorick’s gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and could not stop the loss of blood … At six I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt soaked in tears.”[14] Observe here that, while Sterne’s blood and tears blend, the writer simultaneously confounds his identity with that of the protagonist of A Sentimental Journey. He declares the blood “came, I think, from the heart!”[15] Just as Yorick in Paris counts the shopgirl’s pulse, Sterne declares to Eliza, “thou wilt number my tears.”[16] Both blood and tears are thus liquids subject to a solicitous kind of reckoning. At Moulines, in A Sentimental Journey, the presence of melancholy-mad Maria, a tearful character familiar to the reader from Tristram Shandy, as well as the force of his own confluent yet contradictory feelings, prompt Yorick to say, “I am positive I have a soul.”[17] To collate A Sentimental Journey with Sterne’s “Journal to Eliza,” as I do, is not an operation without authorial warrant. Sterne tells Elizabeth Draper on July 3, 1767, “I steal something every day from my sentimental Journey to obey a more sentimental impulse in writing to you—my Love, my sincerity.”[18]

Wonderful Fabric

Samuel Johnson disparaged Sterne’s Tristram Shandy thus: “Nothing odd will do long.”[19] Since our present inquiry is into the matter of pulse-taking, the adjective has a pleasant incidental numeric resonance, “odd” (and “even”) belonging to the sphere of counting. Johnson’s censure of Sterne is revealing. It pithily evokes core arithmetical concepts—nothing (naught, zero), oddity (something, a remainder, a numerical surplus, a superfluity), and length (an idea of duration, connected—in this context—to a concept of longevity, of literary legacy). Johnson’s is an anxious put-down, manifesting a critic’s will to abbreviate the term of a writer’s repute, with an awareness of how proximate some form of this annihilation is to everyone—writer or not. Ironically, Johnson’s verdict could furnish an epigraph to Sterne’s oeuvre as such, articulating (as it does) both life’s strangeness and the brevity of all our ado.

Despite his dismissiveness, in his 1739 biography of Dr. Herman Boerhaave, a professor at Leiden, Johnson worries about the same issues that preoccupy Yorick in A Sentimental Journey. Quoting his physician-subject’s own remarks, Johnson provides a model of the Eucharist that, somewhat tacitly, vindicates the material bias of anatomy while preserving a persuasion of the soul’s existence. Johnson tells us how Boerhaave, alongside his Calvinist studies as a minister’s son, mastered the art of medicine. Boerhaave always craved, in Johnson’s phrase, “to engage in the Cure of Souls,” as well as of bodies.[20] In his last academic address, as Johnson assures us, Boerhaave “asserts the Power and Wisdom of the Creator from the wonderful Fabric of the Human Body.” The aim is to chasten the hubris of investigators claiming that their technical feats can equal “the Work of God.” Johnson does not draw out the Eucharistic allusion at large in Boerhaave’s argument, but we can hear it clearly enough in his account:

Let all these Heroes of Science meet together, says Boerhaave, let them take Bread and Wine, the Food that forms the Blood of Man, and by Assimilation contributes to the Growth of the Body: Let them try all their Arts, they shall not be able from these Materials to produce a single Drop of Blood. So much is the most common act of Nature beyond the utmost Efforts of the most extended Science![21]

By echoing Christ’s words at the Last Supper, Boerhaave (and Johnson after him) conveys to us the insight that, questions of Catholicism and Protestantism aside, our own bodies continually perform the miracle of transubstantiation. Wine does turn into blood; bread into body. It is a simple fact of our animal constitution. We are, each of us, busily Eucharistic creatures—autonomic incarnations (in this respect) of the festal remembrance that Christ had asked of his followers. In Boerhaave’s opinion, which Johnson endorses, materialism, thus inflected, furnishes the strongest refutation of godlessness in theology’s arsenal. As I will argue, eighteenth-century advocates of St. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque’s devotion to the Sacred Heart coincide with Boerhaave and Johnson in relying on the doctrine of incarnation to defend the idea of a hybrid carnal and spiritual apprehension of God.

A Simple Folly?

Many have written on the scene in which Yorick takes a Parisian shopgirl’s pulse, having entered her premises to ask (on a whim) directions to the Opéra Comique.[22] Commentators bring to bear on the circumstances a battery of technical-sounding terms that would impress both Toby and Walter Shandy, the military engineer and the rhetorician respectively. A critic such as W.G. Day, for example, deploys the phrase tactus interruptus—touch or, even more suggestively, feeling interrupted.[23] Day explains how Sterne characteristically matches a logical or emotional interruption with a description of actual, physical contact broken off. His binomial nomenclature, happily, stretches to fit other Sternean literary effects. Yorick only touches on things before changing the subject. The narrator goes off on tangents, the typographical warrant of which is the oft-recurring dash. The noun “tangent,” of course, comes from the verb tangere, to touch. By tactful touch, we may compute a stranger’s pulse.

Other authorities, inspecting Sterne’s syntax, note his liking for aposiopesis or anacoluthon, the figure of discontinuing utterance rather than finishing it and rounding out or explicitly articulating its sense. Here is the verbal equivalent of handing and unhanding, flirting and withdrawing, and advancing only to recoil from an obstacle interior or exterior—relinquishing meaning-making for us at the end of a dash or hurrying past conventional exposition by way of constructio praegnans.[24] Techniques such as these, which favour suspension and suggestion over consummation or completion, have their corollary, for the purposes of the present argument, in Anglican dissent from wholehearted endorsement of the Catholic expectation of a full metamorphosis of bread and wine, presumed to be entirely realized during the performance of the Eucharist. Instead, the Anglican Yorick exalts the work or the play of imagination, a faculty that must acknowledge, humbly or ironically, the remainder of what it has not transformed—of what it cannot transform. In 1563, the Church of England declared, “Transubstantiation … cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.”[25] Catholic worship itself remained functionally under proscription in England until 1791, the time of the Relief Act. Charles II introduced legislation ensuring that British aspirants to public office had to recite these words: “I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper into the body and blood of Christ.”[26]

Double entendre irrefutably infuses Yorick’s contact with the shopgirl, and Sterne’s narrator, whose destination, after all, is the Opéra Comique. This implies the proximity of pulse-taking to an adulterous caress, the grisette’s husband (who in troglodytic fashion occupies the dark back parlour of her store) being cast in the role of cuckold. The link between a woman’s pulse and her longing is a commonplace documented in the visual art of Sterne’s time. Isidore-Stanislas Helman, for example, made an engraving after a 1773 painting by Jean-Baptiste Le Prince called “Le médecin clair-voyant.”[27] Here is the contemporary description of this work: “Une jeune fille, qui se croit malade consulte un vieux médecin qui, en lui tâtant le pouls lui apprend que sa maladie est dans le Coeur.”[28] With the index finger not taking his patient’s pulse, the physician appears to graze her (clothed) left breast, beneath which, he conjectures, the seat of her affections languishes with unfulfilled desire.

Confronting “The Pulse. Paris,” a skeptic operating within the limits of critique, as Felski delineates them, might be persuaded of the shopgirl’s uneasy obligation, as a saleswoman, to comply with Yorick’s invasive act of pulse taking and therefore choose to emphasize the hint of abuse in his uninvited probation of her heart rate. Conceding the eccentricity and intimacy of the gesture and the uncertain reception it might receive, a close reader might first observe that the scene is probably fiction. Then, too, if we take these proceedings “for real,” the grisette’s husband waits readily available no farther than the next room (there is a whole chapter entitled “The Husband”). Most work has monotonous stretches, relieved episodically by the necessity of engaging with the public. Yorick is not, in any case, propositioning the young woman. As for Sterne, his concurrent, lived—epistolary—affair with Elizabeth Draper exhibits features in common with the pulse-taking scene. For eros to irradiate the dying Sterne or his character Yorick, it appears necessary that the object of infatuation remain unavailable, whether the sentiment she evokes is passing or sustained. The letter writer Richard Griffith, gossiping about Sterne’s attachment to Mrs. Draper, diagnosed the romance as “merely a simple Folly. Any other Idea of the matter would be more than the most abandoned Vice could render probable … To sink into the Arms of Death alive!”[29] When the shopgirl fits him with gloves, Yorick implies his utter inadequacy when he finds them much too large: “The beautiful Grisset [sic] measured them one by one across my hand—It would not alter the dimensions—She begg’d I would try a single pair, which seemed to be the least—She held it open—my hand slipp’d into it at once—It will not do, said I shaking my head a little—No, said she, doing the same thing.”[30] This exchange shimmers with innuendo, but Yorick’s self-satire and will to renunciation are hard to dispute. Notable, moreover, in this passage is both the recurrence and transferal of an arithmetical preoccupation. The shopgirl’s wrist quivers with an ascertainable pulse; Yorick’s hand has a particular—deficient—size. Incarnation is a focus here. The heart keeps time; the hand occupies space. Time and space confine and destine us mortals.

In his “Journal to Eliza” (Sunday, April 13, 1767), Sterne apostrophizes his correspondent as “eternal sunshine <of my heart>!”[31] Conceding the element of simple secularity in Sterne, but remembering (as he clearly could) the precedent of Alexander Pope’s Eloisa—who memorably identifies the existence of “amorous charity”—I wish to highlight how, for Sterne, such charity is not, pace Eloisa, “pious fraud.”[32] I would go so far as to argue that his “Journal to Eliza” is, innovatively, a venture in composing a prose heroic epistle. Whereas Pope Catholicizes the model offered by Ovid’s Heroides, A Sentimental Journey’s Yorick continually negotiates between Catholic and Protestant assumptions. As I will show in due course, the language of Christian difference and congruence infuses the conversation between the shopgirl and Yorick, even when the subject is money, and the atmosphere is one of coquetry. Arthur H. Cash reminds us that, for several years, Sterne assisted his rabidly anti-Papist uncle Jaques Sterne in a campaign to prosecute the nuns of Micklegate Bar outside York—one of only two convents in England at the time of the Forty-Five or second Jacobite rebellion.[33] A Sentimental Journey’s rapprochement with Catholicism may (among other things) make oblique, partial, and ambiguous reparation for Sterne’s early punitiveness and zealotry.

A sentimental cardiognost, Yorick would stage the translation of hands, blood, and hearts; anglophone and francophone; and male and female, by reading the pulse—a rhythm detectable to the tips of our farthest natural extremities.[34] In a typical passage, Yorick tells an interlocutor, Count de B****, that his mission is “to spy the nakedness of [women’s] hearts.” He goes on to confide that, to him, every woman is “a temple,” hung with “original drawings and loose sketches.”[35] On such a basis, he claims “consanguinity,” shared blood, with a fille de chambre who carries with her Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s book Les Égarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit, a title Yorick chooses to abbreviate to The Wanderings of the Heart.[36] Sterne’s cardiac preoccupation, though apparently very much of the vogue for sentiment, may signalize, as I have said, his awareness of a specific Roman Catholic development. Disputation about the cult of the Sacred Heart reaches its highest pitch of intensity precisely as Sterne sets out to compose A Sentimental Journey—1765–67.

A Sentimental Journey is a book of the heart: embarrassed, avid, and yet, like the pulse itself, amenable to certain calculability. The narrative obeys heart-time—its tempo is the heart’s. Impulsiveness proceeds from the pulsating organ. Every movement of the heart (to paraphrase Yorick) properly and inalienably belongs to us, insofar as God created man and woman ad imaginem suam, after his own image.[37] To assess a pulse is a sacramental as well as an erotic act—a form of quasi-medical communion, Eucharistic in the root sense of the adjective, an affair of the freely gifted or the freely offered (ευ–χαρίζεσθαι).[38] It is sensual yet promises to overcome the doom of sexual dimorphism. It is, inevitably, metonymic. Writing to John Hall-Stevenson from Toulouse (on August 12, 1762), the author recounts how a vessel in his lungs broke: “It happen’d in the night, and I bled the bed full, and finding in the morning I was likely to bleed to death, I sent immediately for a surgeon to bleed me at both arms—this saved me, and with lying speechless three days I recovered upon my back in bed.”[39] Sterne knew from experience that to take a pulse is to engross or forfeit very little in a reconnaissance of the heart, by contrast with a gushing hemorrhage or a surgeon’s exaction.

“And How does it Beat, Monsieur?”

On February 6, 1765, Pope Clement XIII (1758–69) approved some measure of devotion, in some quarters, to the Sacred Heart. He thus gave belated papal sanction to the assertions of an eventual saint, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, who experienced three revelations or visions between 1673 and 1675.[40] The Jesuit Claude de la Colombière urged her to set down an account of her experiences. Alacoque, a member of the Order of the Visitation of Our Lady at the convent of Paray-le-Monial, recounts how, in the course of her contemplation, she yielded her heart to the power of divine love (“livrant mon Coeur à la force de son amour”). Christ himself, she reports, made her repose upon his sacred breast, where he disclosed the wonders of his love and the unexplainable secrets of his own sacred heart: “Il me fit reposer fort longtemps sur sa divine poitrine, où il me découvrit les merveilles de son amour et les secrets inexplicables de son sacré Coeur.”[41] She adds that Christ “me demanda mon Coeur, lequel je le suppliai de prendre, ce qui’il fit, et le mit dans le sein adorable … Puis, l’en retirant comme une flame ardente en forme de Coeur, il le remit dans le lieu où il l’avoit pris.”[42]

No less an eminence than Marie Antoinette interceded with Pope Clement XIII to promote Alacoque’s style of devotion. At the time, resistance to the cultus of the Sacred Heart articulated itself in the Catholic Church around the dubiousness of endorsing the dismemberment of the divine person, even for purposes of worship. The faithful should not address themselves exclusively to parts of Christ, or so the argument ran. Sterne’s typical rhetorical method is, of course, to focus on just such parts (hands and wrists in the case of “The Pulse. Paris”). But what could this intramural Catholic dispute over doctrine and practice have to do with Sterne and his A Sentimental Journey? I want to point to a couple of points—vertices or tangents—before I return my attention to Yorick and the shopgirl.

Sterne visited Rome in 1765, the centenary of Alacoque’s final revelation.[43] Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank points out that, between 1765 and 1767, “potent [debates] pitted enlightened Catholicism, a faith not based on mysticism, against a ‘religione del cuore’ (religion of the heart, including but not exclusively, the Heart), which was identified with the papacy and the Jesuits, and extended Counter-Reformation principles into the ‘Age of Reason.’”[44] Kilroy-Ewbank emphasizes the waxing influence in Provence and Italy of Joseph de Gallifet’s 1726 De cultu Sacrosancti Cordis Dei (Concerning the Cult of the Sacred Heart of God), which was widely translated in the 1730s—even though it was placed on the Roman Index of proscribed books in 1704. Gallifet and his illustrator, Charles Natoire, insist on “the importance of the carnality of Christ’s Sacred Heart.”[45] Kilroy-Ewbank explains, “Natoire’s prints were the first to demonstrate acute visual sensitivity to the Heart’s human anatomy. It is believed Gallifet directed Natoire to depict both Hearts [Alacoque’s and Christ’s] as carnal organs through subtle variations in light and shadow.”[46] Natoire’s print of the hearts bound together with a wreath of thorns bears an inscription testifying that it represents the holy organ in sua naturali forma ac magnitudine.[47] Boerhaave would have admired the veridicality of the image. Enthusiasts of the Sacred Heart insistently physicalized Jesus’. Taking the human heart as the seat of human feeling, Gallifet calls it the noblest organ, and (as Kilroy-Ewbank puts it) he makes Jesus’ the noblest of all.

While in Rome, Sterne stayed with a church official, Cardinal Alessandro Albani. After Sterne had departed (on December 28, 1765), Albani commended the novelist’s “great wit” to Sir Horace Mann, the British envoy posted to Florence. Who was Albani? Arthur H. Cash tells us, “Nations which would have no diplomatic relations with the Pope … pursued their diplomatic ends through one cardinal or another who was known as their ‘protector.’”[48] Cardinal Albani functioned as the Pope’s liaison with Great Britain. He oversaw the Vatican library. The issue and the image of the Sacred Heart definitely permeated the air in the year of Sterne’s visit to Rome. James Hall tells us, moreover, “Albani was the nephew of Pope Clement XI, who had given tacit support to the Cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by publishing a Bull in 1713 condemning Jansenist attacks on the validity of mystical visions.”[49] Jansenists rancorously opposed the Sacred Heart in the mid-1760s. Kilroy-Ewbank notes that “the Italian prelate Scipioni de’ Ricci launched vitriolic attacks” against the cult, alleging “it was not only without biblical antecedent, but also heretical and idolatrous.”[50] The topicality of the Sacred Heart, and its central mystery of God’s heart in union with a human (female) heart, may determine aspects of A Sentimental Journey’s pulse-taking scene. Though the evidence is circumstantial, Sterne does make his impassioned tourist perform an ironic and Protestantized act of devotion to a sacred heart.

The shopgirl attracts the comic adoration of a subject of what the French of the period sometimes depreciated as a dismally mercantile-minded kingdom, England. Yet, like the Calvinist Herman Boerhaave and the Catholic Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, Yorick discovers the work of God in the fabric of the human body, in this case female.[51] His act of communion (or of transubstantiation) is medical and aesthetic in tendency. He enumerates a young woman’s successive pulsations, transposing the impression of them from his sensitive fingertips into the realm of accountancy and intimacy, so long as he touches her wrist. Yorick, therefore, relishes the smallest readily apprehensible units of the grisette’s literal lifetime. Feeling lost in the heat of divine charity, the visionary Alacoque sought a minimal spatial rather than temporal unit to convey her intimate experience of holy love. She says her heart appeared like a minute atom, consumed in a scorching furnace (“comme un petit atome qui se consumoit dans cette ardente fournaise”).[52]

Even the way in which Yorick positions the hand that takes the shopgirl’s pulse has, perhaps, a Catholic connotation, at least as Yorick describes it: “I took hold of her fingers in one hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery.”[53] What Sterne denominates “the two forefingers” (that is to say, the first and second phalanges) are characteristically extended in a Catholic gesture of blessing such as Christ makes, for example, in Masaccio’s fifteenth-century painting “The Resurrection.”[54] This pair of fingers, held straight (as Yorick’s must be while he assesses the shopgirl’s wrist), are understood to represent Jesus’ dual nature, both human and divine. Henry Edward (author of The Divine Glory of the Sacred Heart [1873]) explains, “[Christ’s] actions are called theandric and deiviriles, because they are actions of God and man.”[55] More generally, the laying on of hands is a Christian gesture of an essential kind. Yorick wears his ecclesiastical black throughout his communion with the grisette.

True Devotion

Sterne writes in the spirit of play, and, adopting that spirit, let us consider how his discourse of sentiment parallels Alacoque’s more exalted, visionary, seventeenth-century vocabulary. Sterne once offered this description to David Garrick of the French habit of using a mystical vocabulary under less than mystical circumstances: “if [a woman] is but simply pleased—’tis nothing less than that she is ravi–sh’d—and when ravi–sh’d, (which may happen) there is nothing left for her but to fly to the other world for a metaphor, and swear, qu’elle toit extasiée … there is scarce a woman … but is seven times a day in downright extasy—that is, the devil’s in her—by a small mistake of one world for another.”[56] Alacoque’s seventeenth-century convent sisters described her state as, precisely, “extasiée.”[57]

The narrative context of the pulse-taking scene in A Sentimental Journey is worth noting if we want to consider the possibility that Sterne’s stay with Cardinal Albani, for example, influenced his literary imagination. Just after Yorick palpates the grisette’s wrist, he recalls a droll misadventure with the Marchesa Fagnani in Milan, and he alludes to a saint, Cecilia—“one of the [book’s] few incidents,” Arthur H. Cash reminds us, “laid in Italy.” Sterne’s Italian experience would seem, therefore, to be associated closely with the topic of the holiness and the drollery of the heart’s affections.[58]

In fact, Yorick’s phrasing even suggests Alacoque’s. She outright medicalizes Christ: she appeals, “Venez, o charitable Médecin de mon âme, O celeste Médecin de mon âme.”[59] She solicits Christ’s intervention without reserve. Sterne, for his part, emphasizes the shopgirl’s extreme willingness (in keeping with the idea of charity and the concept of ευ–χαρίζεσθαι, “The Pulse. Paris”). She is compliant and says, “Most willingly,” and again, “Tres volentieres; most willingly” [sic].[60] Consider the oddity of Yorick’s reasoning and his action: “Any one may do a casual act of good nature, but a continuation of them shews it is part of the temperature … if it is the same blood which comes from the heart, which descends to the extremes (touching her wrist) I am sure you have one of the best pulses of any woman in the world.”[61] Like Christ in Alacoque’s vision, Yorick takes the initiative after a woman displays undifferentiated, ardent hospitality to him. The grisette at once agrees to his curious suggestion and says, “Feel it …. holding out her arm.” Yorick explains, “I took hold of her fingers in one hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery.”[62] For her part, Alacoque reports, “He asked for my heart, and I entreated him to take it.”[63]

There is some comedy in Yorick’s proleptic diagnosis of the grisette’s possessing “one of the best pulses of any woman in the world.”[64] A proper physician requires a patient’s standard heart rate against which to measure deviation. As Sir John Floyer (who introduced the pulse watch in 1707) wrote, “It is requisite that every intelligent Patient should thus try his Pulse in a Morning in his Health, that he may inform his Physician what number of Pulses he has in a perfect Health, by which a Physician may judge of his natural Constitution; and the Physician may know how far the diseas’d Pulse receeds [sic] from the Natural Numbers; and whether the Numbers of the Pulse are increased or be deficient.”[65]

Yorick ostensibly reports these events to his friend Eugenius (a name identifying the latter as no less than his “Good Genius”—also his old friend, John Hall-Stevenson, dignified by the pseudonym).[66] Yorick appeals “to heaven” and emphasizes how he wears his clerical garb at the time, “counting the throbs … one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb and flow of her fever … I care not if all the world saw me feel it.”[67] “Devotion” is the very thing Pope Clement XIII approved in 1765. It is characteristic not just of visionary Catholics but also of good doctors and lovers. Etymologically, “devotion” brings with it strong religious connotations: a thing devoted is vowed, promised, even sacrificed (devoveo). Sterne suffered from tuberculosis, a disease accompanied by fever. In Tristram Shandy, the narrator relates the affecting tale of the death of Le Fever: “Nature instantly ebbed again … the pulse fluttered—stopped—went on—throbbed—stopped again—moved—shall I go on?—No.”[68] In “Journal to Eliza” (April 15, 1767), Sterne tells his correspondent that he is “worn out with fevers of all kinds but most, by the fever of the heart with [which] I’m eternally wasting.”[69]

In this same idea of fever as it applies to the perfectly healthy shopgirl, we have (it may be) a bourgeois modulation from the ecstatic, furnace-like heat of Christ’s heart in Alacoque’s account of her adoration. In Alacoque’s revelations, Christ deals in metonymies, heart for heart, heat for heat. Her attendant physician, one Dr. Billiet, declared that she endured sixty successive bouts of a violent fever, “soixante accès de suite.”[70] After Alacoque’s third revelation, Bougaud assures us, “la fièvre tomba, le pouls reprit son calme.”[71]

Sterne puns on “temperature” and sets trembling all the meanings, physical and metaphysical, of “nature,” “goodness,” “extremes,” “hand,” and “heart.” Sterne might have availed himself of Fahrenheit’s thermometer had he packed one: another new-fangled method of reckoning the state of soul and body.[72] Yorick’s preoccupation with “temperature” chimes with Alacoque’s image of the furnace of Christ’s love and heart. We might say that the experience and experiment of pulse-taking sets Yorick equivocally between the medical Herman Boerhaave and the mystical Alacoque.

Mindful of Alacoque’s experience, Catholics today—and even Protestant denominations—describe the Eucharist itself as the “heartbeat” of the church. Through sidelong Jesuit influence in England, several High Church Anglicans currently pursue devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ. In fact, Claude de la Colombière, who interviewed Alacoque and endorsed her revelations, arrived in London in 1676 to perform the role of aumônier or confessor to Marie d’Este, otherwise known as Mary of Modena, wife to the Duke of York (later James II). He officiated at the Queen’s Chapel (established on Henrietta-Maria’s behalf) until, in 1678, the rabid fracas of the Popish Plot exploded.[73] Denounced, de la Colombière was imprisoned for three weeks in the fetor of King’s Bench Prison, from which he was released in December 1678. His London “Retreat Notes” of 1677 testify to de la Colombière’s belief in the veracity of Alacoque’s revelations.[74]

Critics such as Martin Battestin remind us that Sterne intended his A Sentimental Journey as a “Work of Redemption.”[75] Bougaud explains the unique tendency of devotion to the Sacred Heart. It is, he says, “une culte de reparation, de consolation et d’amende honorable.”[76] Yorick expresses no embarrassment about his pulse–taking: “I care not if all the world saw me feel it.”[77] Bougaud (for his part) approves of the way in which Alacoque’s personal revelations passed into collective awareness and communal practice. The Sacred Heart (he says) has become the property of a public and acknowledged cult after having been the intimate theme of a private rite for so long.[78]

Faith

As we know, after submitting to have her pulse taken, the shopgirl fits Yorick with gloves: “She held [one] open—my hand slipp’d into it at once … She had a quick black eye, and shot through two such long and silken eye–lashes with such penetration, that she look’d into my very heart and reins—It may seem strange, but I could actually feel she did.”[79] “Reins” is a word of Scriptural weight and import, as in Psalm 7:9, “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.” The shopgirl’s erotic power is likened, thus obliquely, to that of the object of both Catholic and Protestant worship. The OED defines “reins” as “the seat of the feelings or affections.”[80] Read with Alacoque in mind, the gloving scene is even, conceivably, a metonymy of setting the heart inside a chest: a mystical marriage of sorts. Yorick’s hand wholly enters what she freely offers while she reciprocally penetrates him to the heart: a transplant occurs.

Consider again what Alacoque says:

One time being before the Blessed Sacrament … I felt myself wholly invested by the Divine Presence … [I] abandoned myself to this Divine Spirit … He showed [my heart] to me as a minute atom, consumed in [his chest’s] scorching furnace: and withdrawing it in the form of a heart-shaped flare, he restored it to the place from which He had taken it, saying to me, “My well beloved, I give a precious pledge of my love, having enclosed within your side a scintilla of my love’s living fire, to serve you for a heart.”[81]

The future saint thus undergoes a kind of fitting. The primary meaning of “invest”—Alacoque is “wholly invested”—is to envelope with a garment;[82] gloving furnishes a good example. Investiture is the ceremonial clothing of a person in the livery of ecclesiastical dignity. Alacoque experiences, moreover, a kind of heart operation, too, for which Yorick’s trying on of gloves seems a comic, even bawdy, though for all that not entirely scoffing analogy. “Gloving,” a case in which the hand as an entirety is encompassed, contains within it the gerunds “loving” and, with the adjustment of a single consonant, “glowing.” Alacoque uses a curious verb assimilable to the world of clothes and clothing as she recounts her obligation. She explains that the heart of God must be honoured under the form of his heart of flesh, whose image he wants exposed, and worn by a devotee above the heart. The French phrasing is “exposée et portée.” Instead of a badge representing the Sacred Heart (blazoned with the motto “charitas”), Yorick wears on his chest a miniature of his endeared Eliza, who “had a right to [his] whole heart,” as readers learn in the first chapter of A Sentimental Journey.[83]

Sterne slyly guarantees his scene’s mock-and-straight sacramental register. Yorick, at last, out of complaisance, buys a couple of pairs of gloves from the shopgirl and pockets these remembrances, interiorizing them on his person in a manner of speaking. As very often in his encounters with men and women, Yorick wants to add to this quotidian expense a sum of charitable money, a χαριστήριον, a gratuitous reward, a pecuniary outlay proportioned suitably with his depth of feeling. The grisette, in her turn, puckishly avers her honesty as a businesswoman, insisting that she would never take advantage of a man who “has done [her] the honour of laying himself at her mercy.”[84] At the idea of cheating, which only she raised, she asks with faux indignation, “M’en croyez capable?”—to which, the Protestant Yorick rejoins, alluding to her verb, which has religious connotations as well as personal, “Faith! Not I.” [85] “Faith” is, in fact, the crucial word in the Church of England’s 1563 rejection of transubstantiation: “the mean[s] whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.”[86] As he tallied the grisette’s pulse, so Yorick now counts “money into her hand” to seal an ordinary transaction transformed by faith, assuredly, but also by hope, as well as by that most sublime of virtues: charity.

Though ineffable, the impulses of the human heart submit to naked calculability in the pulse. A traveller’s inexpressible feelings likewise translate into a severely limited sphere: mere expenses, whether costs or donations. Addressing Elizabeth Draper, Sterne writes, “dear have I bought thee”[87] and “Thou art mine by purchase.”[88] Monetary language inflects Scriptural contexts; redemption is no less than a buying back, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer speaks of the salvation that Christ’s blood has “purchased” worshippers. Yorick insists that the “simple subtlety” of his transaction with the grisette would stagger “all the languages of Babel set loose together.”[89] It is Alacoque’s simplicity that Catholics such as Émile Bougaud regard as the warrant for respecting and emulating her experience of God’s sacré coeur. Claude de la Colombière himself adopted, at the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1677, before an audience at the Palace of St. James, a tone and sensibility that anticipate Sterne’s. Charles Daniel actually credits de la Colombière with inaugurating “in the bosom of [a] heretical nation [namely, England] the apostolate of the Heart of Jesus,” with the following words: “Thou must, O my God, give us another heart, a tender heart, a sensitive heart, a heart not of bronze or marble.”[90] Yorick would endorse the sentiment.

Promoting the office of the Sacré Coeur in 1765, Clement XIII resisted “the somber doctrine of ‘the fewness of the elect,’ illustrated by the so-called Jansenist crucifix, where the arms are not outstretched to embrace all.”[91] This Pope even tried, without much success, to reunite the body of the Catholic with the Protestant church. Sterne’s itinerant sentimentalist, Yorick, pursues a similar project—albeit in what other than a Shandean manner? Suppose the shy Clement XIII, known to some as Sua Scrupulosità, His Delicacy, remains memorable in art history for his campaign, climaxing in 1758 and 1759, to impose metal fig leaves on the Belvedere’s bronze and marble population of nude statuary. In that case, Yorick’s example reminds us that, at heart, we cannot but be naked.[92]