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Updated: June 11, 2025
The story is entitled “Das Mündel,” “The Ward,” and is evidently intended as a masculine companion-piece to the fateful story of Maria of Moulines, linked to it even in the actual narrative itself. An unfortunate, half-crazed man goes about in silence, performing little services in an inn where Yorick finds lodging. The hostess tells his story.
Pankraz loses the sympathy of the reader, involuntarily and irresistibly conceded him, and becomes an inhuman freak of absurdity, beyond our interest. Pankraz is brought into disaster by his slavish following of suggestions aroused through fancied parallels between his own circumstances and those related of Yorick. He finds a sorrowing woman sitting, like Maria of Moulines, beneath a poplar tree.
He was once the brilliant son of the village miller, was well-educated and gifted with scholarly interests and attainments. While instructing some children at Moulines, he meets a peasant girl, and love is born between them. An avaricious brother opposes Jacques’s passion and ultimately confines him in secret, spreading the report in Moulines of his faithlessness to his love.
It is claimed by Goebel that Goethe’s “Homunculus,” suggested to the master partly by reading of Paracelsus and partly by Sterne’s mediation, is in some characteristics of his being dependent directly on Sterne’s creation. In a meeting of the “Gesellschaft für deutsche Litteratur,” November, 1896, Brandl expressed the opinion that Maria of Moulines was a prototype of Mignon in “Wilhelm Meister.”
The figure of the distraught Maria of Moulines is tenderly drawn; the accessories of the picture her goat, her dog, her pipe, her song to the Virgin though a little theatrical, perhaps, are skilfully touched in; and so long as the Sentimental Traveller keeps our attention fixed upon her and them the scene prospers well enough.
Such a man as the Bishop of Moulines would never have suffered such barbarism, and the country that spent 300,000 pounds a year on this one prison, would never have grudged a coffin apiece to each poor fellow's body that required one. "It was only a prisoner." There, without attracting the notice of the others, and so depressing them, but with decency and reverence, they laid the dead to rest.
In Schummel’s narration of his adventures in the house of ill-repute there are numerous sentimental excrescences in his conduct with the poor prisoner there, due largely to Yorick’s pattern, such as their weeping on one another’s breast, and his wiping away her tears and his, drawn from Yorick’s amiable service for Maria of Moulines, an act seemingly expressing the most refined human sympathy.
A man can face his foes with a spirit undaunted and unyielding, but he can not fly from them without trembling as he looks behind. For two or three days, with blistered feet, and a heart agitated even beyond all his powers of stoical endurance, he toiled painfully along his dreary journey. As he was entering Moulines, his marked features were recognized.
The Sentimental Traveller does not obtrude himself to the same extent as in the scene at Moulines; but a little consideration of the scene will show how much Sterne relied on the mere presentment of the fact that here was an unfortunate peasant who had lost his dumb companion, and here a tender-hearted gentleman looking on and pitying him.
Tournier was a gentleman, and therefore repressed the exclamation that was rising to his lips, and simply said, "Oh!" in a very languid sort of way. But it was true. The chaplain to the prisoners had been asking after Tournier, expressing a very great desire to see him; and the Chaplain was none other than the Bishop of Moulines.
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