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The Marquis D'E—. — "The Sword."
Tony Johannot.
J. Brevier.
1857
Engraving on wood
12.8 cm high by x 10 cm wide
Eighth full-page illustration for A Sentimental Journey (1857), facing page 140.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The Marquis and his whole family embarked the next day for Martinico, and in about nineteen or twenty years of successful application to business, with some unlook’d for bequests from distant branches of his house, return home to reclaim his nobility, and to support it.
It was an incident of good fortune which will never happen to any traveller but a Sentimental one, that I should be at Rennes at the very time of this solemn requisition: I call it solemn;—it was so to me.
The Marquis entered the court with his whole family: he supported his lady, — his eldest son supported his sister, and his youngest was at the other extreme of the line next his mother;—he put his handkerchief to his face twice.
There was a dead silence. When the Marquis had approached within six paces of the tribunal, he gave the Marchioness to his youngest son, and advancing three steps before his family,—he reclaim’d his sword. His sword was given him, and the moment he got it into his hand he drew it almost out of the scabbard: ’twas the shining face of a friend he had once given up — he look’d attentively along it, beginning at the hilt, as if to see whether it was the same, when, observing a little rust which it had contracted near the point, he brought it near his eye, and bending his head down over it, I think I saw a tear fall upon the place. I could not be deceived by what followed. —
“I shall find,” said he, “some other way to get it off.”
When the Marquis had said this, he returned his sword into its scabbard, made a bow to the guardians of it; and, with his wife and daughter, and his two sons following him, walked out.
O, how I envied him his feelings! ["The Sword. Rennes," pp. 140-41]
Johannot depicts the Marquis and his family as if returning from exile on the island of Martinique in the West Indies to reclaim not merely a sword, the weapon of an aristocrat, but also their status and noble identity after two decades of engaging in commerce in order to recover the family fortunes. The President of the Royal Tribunal for the Duchy of Britanny at Rennes restores the blade, ever so slightly rusted at its tip, to the economic exile. Having prepared the reader for this sentimental scene in his frontispiece, Johannot embues the whole scene with a delicate emotionalism as the oldest son is overwhelmed with tears as his father holds his hand. The anomalous recovery of noble status was possible only in Britanny, where Yorick's travels in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy do not take him.
Britanny (on the northern coast of France) was unusual in permitting hard-up nobles to suspend their status while they engaged in trade: in other French provinces, one's nobility would be permanently forfeit if one degenerated into commerce. [Turner, , p. 134n2]
Although in narrating the sentimental incident that his protagonist is not likely to have witnesses Sterne passes over the circumstances of the noble family's economic recovery, in fact the Marquis can reclaim his weapon and status through the despicable institution of slavery since the economy of Martinique was then dependant upon the production of sugar cane. Just after Yorick's visit to Paris in 1762, the British and French governments sealed the peace ending the Seven Years War with the return to France of the island, which the British had seized, in exchange for all of Canada, of which the British had gained control as a consequence of Wolfe's conquest of Quebec in 1758.
Above: The 1841 illustration of the Marquis inspecting his sword after the President of the Breton assembly at Rennes has returned it to him. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Illustrated with one hundred engravings on wood, by Bastin and G. Nichols, from original designs by Jacque and Fussell. London: Joseph Thomas, 1841.
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. With 100 illustrations by Tony Johannot. London: Willoughby, 1857.
Turner, Katherine. "Notes." Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010.
Last modified 12 September 2018
