Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн
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The woman that had been given him for wife twenty-five years before was still in France. But she was then about to visit her husband for the purpose of obtaining from him provision for the support of herself and daughter in southern France. After repeated delays Mrs. Sterne reached Coxwold on the second of October. As Sterne looks forward to this visit, his “heart sinks down to the earth.” He would be in health and strength, if it were not for this cloud hanging over him with “its tormenting consequences.” Taking this distress for theme, his friend Hall-Stevenson wrote “an affecting little poem” which Sterne promised to transcribe for Eliza. When illness prevented Mrs. Sterne from setting out from France as soon as she expected, her husband became impatient at the detention, for he was anxious “to know certainly the day and hour of this Judgment.” “The period of misery,” covering a month at length came and passed. Half in love with her husband because of his humanity and generosity, Mrs. Sterne went to York to spend the winter. In the spring she was to retire into France, “whence,” says Sterne, “she purposes not to stir, till her death.—& never, has she vow’d, will give me another sorrowful or discontented hour.” These last weeks with his wife brought to Sterne one consolation more.—Mrs. Sterne confessed to her husband that at the time of her marriage she made herself out ten years younger than she really was. “God bless,” he writes to Eliza, “& make the remainder of her Life happy—in order to wch. I am to remit her three hundred guineas a year.”