in all your days, and to all sorts of people.  ‘Qui le diable est cet homme-la?’ 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 more important services than that of offering him hospitality and flattery.  Peace had not been formally concluded between France and England, and the passport with which Sterne had been graciously furnished by Pitt was not of force enough to dispense him from making special application to the French Government for permission to remain in the country.  In this request he was influentially backed.  “My application,” he writes, “to the Count de Choiseul goes on swimmingly, for not only M. Pelletiere (who by-the-bye sends ten thousand civilities to you and Mrs. G.) has undertaken my affair, but the Count de Limbourg.  The Baron d’Holbach has offered any security for the inoffensiveness of my behaviour in France—­’tis more, you rogue! than you will do.”  And then the orthodox, or professedly orthodox, English divine, goes on to describe the character and habits of his strange new friend:  “This Baron is one of the most learned noblemen here, the great protector of wits and of the savans who are no wits; keeps open house three days a week—­his house is now, as yours was to me, my own—­he lives at great expense.”  Equally communicative is he as to his other great acquaintances.  Among these were the Count de Bissie, whom by an “odd incident” (as it seemed to his unsuspecting vanity) “I found reading Tristram when I was introduced to him, which I was,” he adds (without perceiving the connexion between this fact and the “incident"), “at his desire;” Mr. Fox and Mr. Macartney (afterwards the Lord Macartney of Chinese celebrity), and the Duke of Orleans (not yet Egalite) himself, “who has suffered my portrait to be added to the number of some odd men in his collection, and has had it taken most expressively at full length by a gentleman who lives with him.”  Nor was it only in the delights of society that Sterne was now revelling.  He was passionately fond of the theatre, and his letters to Garrick are full of eager criticism of the great French performers, intermingled with flatteries, sometimes rather full-bodied than delicate, of their famous English rival.  Of Clairon, in Iphigenie, he says “she is extremely great.  Would to God you had one or two like her.  What a luxury to see you with one of such power in the same interesting scene!  But ’tis too much.”  Again he writes:  “The French comedy I seldom visit; they act scarce anything but tragedies; and the Clairon is great, and Mdlle.  Dumesmil in some parts still greater than her.  Yet I cannot bear preaching—­I fancy I got a surfeit of it in my younger days.”  And in a later letter: