When I got home to my hotel, La Fleur told me I had been enquired after by the Lieutenant de Police. "The deuce take it!" said I, "I know the reason." It is time the reader should know it, for in the order of things in which it happened, it was omitted: not that it was out of my head; but that had I told it then it might have been forgotten now; - and now is the time I want it.
I had left London with so much precipitation, that it never enter’d my mind that we were at war with France; and had reached Dover, and looked through my glass at the hills beyond Boulogne, before the idea presented itself; and with this in its train, that there was no getting there without a passport. Go but to the end of a street, I have a mortal aversion for returning back no wiser than I set out.
Laurence STERNE, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
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