Proust's Influence on Sterne: Remembrance of Things to Come

Abstract

In the opening pages of La prisonniere, Marcel looks from the window of his Paris apartment to the street below, hoping to catch a glimpse of some laundress carrying her linen-basket, a bakerwoman in a blue apron, a dairymaid with a tucker and white linen sleeves.... But if the access of joy brought me by the spectacle of women whom it was impossible to imagine a priori made the street, the town, the world, more desirable, more deserving of exploration, it set me longing, for that very reason, to recover my health, to go out of doors and, without Albertine, to be a free man. How often, at the moment when the unknown woman who was to haunt my dreams passed beneath the window, sometimes on foot, sometimes at full speed in a motor-car, did not suffer from the fact that my body could not follow my gaze which kept pace with her, and falling upon her as though shot from the embrasure of my window by an arquebus, arrest the flight of the face that held out for me the offer of a happiness which, thus cloistered, should never know! (p. 20).1 Some 150 years earlier, Sterne's alter-ego, Yorick, had also looked out his Paris window at the sexual energies in the street below, out of reach: I own my first sensations, as soon as was left solitary and alone in my own chamber in the hotel, were far from being so flattering as had prefigured them. walked up gravely to the window in my dusty black coat, and looking through the glass saw all the world in yellow, blue, and green, running at the ring of pleasure.-The old with broken lances, and in helmets which had lost their vizards-the young in