The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [323]
5. Andoüillets: little sausages (French). The story to come is full of bawdy puns.
CHAP. XXI
1. Anchylosis: from the uniting of two bones.
2. sinovia: viscous lubricant secreted by joints.
3. man of Lystra … youth: The allusion is to Acts 14:8 (“a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet”).
4. bonus Henricus: Good King Henry (Latin): one of the many medicinal herbs mentioned in this passage.
5. scapulary: a sleeveless garment normally covering the shoulders (from the Latin for shoulder blade).
6. hot baths of Bourbon: The baths of Bourbon-Lancy in Burgundy were famous from Roman times and thought curative.
7. whitloe: a swelling or suppurating sore in a finger or thumb, usually of the last joint.
8. calesh: a light carriage with a convertible top; usually “calash” (from the French “calèche”).
9. frize: obsolete for “frieze,” a coarse woolen cloth.
10. wine-lees: The muleteer is a heavy drinker (described on the following page as “toping”).
11. bush: a tavern signboard, often containing an ivy branch.
12. Come—come, thirsty muleteer—come in: probably modeled on Don Quixote: “Come, eat me: come, eat me” (2.4.42; 4:229). This is a variant on a proverb; see Tilley, 315.
13. white swelling: This phrase for an abnormal enlargement, without redness, of a body part was extended jocularly to mean pregnancy.
14. By my fig: “Fig” could mean any “worthless thing.” Here, it represents a play on the female genitals.
CHAP. XXII
1. obstreperated: The OED gives this as the sole use of the adjective meaning “clamourous, noisy” as an intransitive verb.
CHAP. XXIII
1. as sure as a gun: proverbial phrase.
CHAP. XXV
1. no sin: As “casuist” (resolver of complicated cases of conscience or, in anti-Catholic thinking, moral equivocator) the abbess is claiming that neither of them is saying “foutre” (to fuck) or “bouger” (to budge or move, but also “bougre,” bugger).
2. fa, sol … complines: The abbess refers to the chant in honor of John the Baptist (named for the hexachord, or six-note scale, from which its initial syllables come) sung at the last evening service.
CHAP. XXVI
1. Fa-ra … dumb - c: imitative of fiddle music.
CHAP. XXVII
1. out-gallop the king: This act was forbidden.
2. Allons: Let’s go (French).
3. grand tour: The grand tour was a cultural coming-of-age rite for a well-off young Englishman during which he visited, usually with a tutor, major cities and places of interest in a number of European countries, especially Italy. It might take a year or more.
4. silks: King’s (or Queen’s) Counsels in England (so called for their gowns), barristers: by extension, counselors.
5. opiniatry: opinionatedness. This example is later than those in the OED.
6. abby of Saint-Germain … Charles the Bald: from Piganiol. Work notes that Dominique Séguier (1593–1659), Bishop of Auxerre (Monsieur Sequier), opened the tombs in 1636 and reported on the bodies of the saints. St. Héribalde (824–57) was also Bishop of Auxerre. The successive kings of France are Charles I (Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, 742–814), his son Louis I (Louis the Pious, or the Debonair, 778–840), and his grandson Charles II (823–77).
7. Saint MAXIMA: An actual saint mentioned by Piganiol, though “Saint Maximus” is Sterne’s balancing invention (cf. Amanda and Amandus in ch. 31).
8. Saint Germain: Bishop of Auxerre (c. 380–448), died at Ravenna.
9. Saint Optat: Saint Optatus, Bishop of Auxerre, died c. 530. As with Maximus and Maxima (“the greatest saints”), Sterne plays on the Latin meaning (“desired”).
CHAP. XXVIII
1. Pringello … Sligniac: Antony (Sterne’s friend John Hall-Stevenson, who was anything but the ascetic St. Antony) wrote of Sir William Chambers, the distinguished architect who designed renovations to Hall-Stevenson’s “Crazy Castle” (Skelton Castle), under the name of Don Pringello in Crazy Tales (1762), the bawdy verse narratives to which Tristram refers in the footnote. See Cash, Early and Middle Years, 188–89. Work suggests that Sligniac was the landlord of the house in Toulouse