Sterne

One great piece of travel writing to try is Sterne's 1768 A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy--read it all here. The narrator is called Yorick, a callback to 'Hamlet'. Here is an interesting excerpt that is an example of Sterne's usual appreciation for beauty and women--a grisette is a French working class woman, by the way.

The above illustration by the Austrian artist Angelica Kauffman [1741-1807] is from an earlier part of the story, with a ladies maid, the narrator on the right and a monk on the left. Not the woman's interesting outfit.

Sterne's character Yorick [a self-insert/autobiographical narrator] goes into the Paris shop she's in and asks for directions, and then forgets them after leaving:

[...]

I will not suppose it was the woman’s beauty, notwithstanding she was the handsomest grisette, I think, I ever saw, which had much to do with the sense I had of her courtesy; only I remember, when I told her how much I was obliged to her, that I looked very full in her eyes, - and that I repeated my thanks as often as she had done her instructions.

I had not got ten paces from the door, before I found I had forgot every tittle of what she had said; - so looking back, and seeing her still standing in the door of the shop, as if to look whether I went right or not, - I returned back to ask her, whether the first turn was to my right or left, - for that I had absolutely forgot. - Is it possible! said she, half laughing.  ’Tis very possible, replied I, when a man is thinking more of a woman than of her good advice.

As this was the real truth - she took it, as every woman takes a matter of right, with a slight curtsey.
- Attendez! said she, laying her hand upon my arm to detain me, whilst she called a lad out of the back shop to get ready a parcel of gloves.  I am just going to send him, said she, with a packet into that quarter, and if you will have the complaisance to step in, it will be ready in a moment, and he shall attend you to the place. - So I walk’d in with her to the far side of the shop: and taking up the ruffle in my hand which she laid upon the chair, as if I had a mind to sit, she sat down herself in her low chair, and I instantly sat myself down beside her.

- He will be ready, Monsieur, said she, in a moment. - And in that moment, replied I, most willingly would I say something very civil to you for all these courtesies.  Any one may do a casual act of good nature, but a continuation of them shows it is a part of the temperature; and certainly, added I, if it is the same blood which comes from the heart which descends to the extremes (touching her wrist) I am sure you must have one of the best pulses of any woman in the world. - Feel it, said she, holding out her arm.  So laying down my hat, I took hold of her fingers in one hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery. -

- Would to heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical manner, counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb or flow of her fever. - How wouldst thou have laugh’d and moralized upon my new profession! - and thou shouldst have laugh’d and moralized on. - Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said, “There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman’s pulse.” - But a grisette’s! thou wouldst have said, - and in an open shop!  Yorick -

- So much the better: for when my views are direct, Eugenius, I care not if all the world saw me feel it.