“Fickleness is taxable in France”

“Fickleness is taxable in France” is a comic expression coined during Tristram Shandy’s journey through France. It condenses a specific post-road regulation into a joke about the price of changing one’s mind, then becomes the hinge for the narrator’s sudden declaration that peace has been made. The phrase’s force lies in its double movement: a bureaucratic explanation turns a traveler’s irritation into wit, and the wit turns an imagined dispute into a mock political settlement.

The rule behind the expression

A discussion of the French royal post ordinance establishes the practical issue. The narrator first interprets the rule as requiring anyone who sets out from Paris in a post-chaise to keep travelling that way for life, or pay for it. The commissary corrects him: a traveler who begins a journey from Paris intending to travel by post cannot change that mode without first satisfying the revenue collectors for two additional posts beyond the place where the traveler repents.

The explanation makes the charge a penalty for changing one’s plan, justified on the ground that public revenues must not fall short through a traveler’s fickleness. The phrase takes that official rationale and strips it down to an absurdly compact principle: in France, fickleness is taxable. Its comedy depends on the mismatch between an ordinary alteration of intention and the state’s claim upon the traveler’s purse.

The journey’s practical frustrations

The joke belongs to a travel narrative preoccupied with the costs and interruptions of movement. The narrator describes how repeated payments at each stage can defeat even a determined attempt to sleep in a carriage: the traveler must count out three livres and fifteen sous, deal with missing change or a coin that will not pass, and consult a small-print book of post-roads when a journey is charged as a post and a half. The rule about changing modes extends this comic accounting beyond individual payments, making a change of plan itself subject to a fee.

The broader journey repeatedly exposes the gap between a traveler’s expectations and the constraints of travel. Between Calais and Paris, three possible roads provoke so much argument that half a day may be lost choosing among them. At Calais, the narrator jokes that he can compose a detailed account of a town he barely saw, having arrived at dusk and departed in darkness. Against this background, the French ordinance becomes another instance of how travel is shaped not only by roads and destinations but by rules, payments, and limited opportunities to observe.

From irritation to mock peace

When the commissary explains the ordinance’s purpose, the narrator responds, “O by heavens! cried I—if fickleness is taxable in France—we have nothing to do but to make the best peace with you we can——” The declaration turns the rule’s fiscal logic into a diplomatic joke. Rather than continue contesting a charge that treats a change of mind as a source of lost revenue, the narrator pretends that the sensible response is to make peace.

The next sentence supplies the punchline: “AND SO THE PEACE WAS MADE;” The settlement is instantly presented as accomplished, without negotiation or further detail. The narrator then makes himself responsible for its possible badness, saying that if it is a bad peace, he alone ought to be hanged. The abrupt sequence moves from a regulation, to a witty concession, to a grand-sounding settlement, and finally to self-accusation; the scale of the language far exceeds the modest travel dispute that prompts it.

Narrative function and comic method

The expression works as more than a memorable complaint about travel expenses. It shows how the narrator converts inconvenience into narrative action: a rule about paying for two further posts becomes the occasion for a mock peace. The sudden turn also suits the book’s digressive method, in which an episode of travel can open into commentary and then close with a theatrical flourish rather than a conventional account of reaching a destination.

The wording preserves the distinction between the rule as reported by the commissary and the narrator’s comic interpretation of it. The regulation concerns payment when a traveler changes an intended mode of travel; the expression recasts that condition as a national tax on fickleness. Its lasting point within the episode is therefore not a literal claim about every change of mind in France, but the satirical compression of an official revenue principle into a phrase that makes the traveler’s frustration sound like a diplomatic crisis.