Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн

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Mrs. Draper was buried in the cloisters of Bristol Cathedral, where to her memory stands a monument symbolizing in its two draped figures Genius and Benevolence, the qualities given her in the inscription. The next year the Abbé Raynal, the French historian of the Indies—over whom Mrs. Draper had cast her spells, first in India and afterwards in England—wrote about her in mad eulogy. He had wept, he said, with Eliza over Sterne; and at the time of her death, she was intending to quit her country for a life with him in France. “A statuary,” he goes on to say in description of Mrs. Draper, “who would have wished to represent Voluptuousness, would have taken her for his model; and she would equally have served for him who might have had a figure of Modesty to display. * * * Every instant increased the delight she inspired; every instant rendered her more interesting. * * * Eliza then was very beautiful? No, she was simply beautiful: but there was no beauty she did not eclipse, because she was the only one that was like herself.”^[1] And long afterwards, James Forbes, to whose Oriental Memoirs we owe so much for the social India of those days, paid his tribute to Mrs. Draper. Anjengo he averred would ever be celebrated as the birthplace of Eliza: “a lady with whom I had the pleasure of being acquainted at Bombay, whose refined tastes and elegant accomplishments require no encomium from my pen.” To the various places where Mrs. Draper lived in India the curious long made pilgrimages. Colonel James Welsh of the Madras infantry visited the house at Anjengo where she was supposed to be born, and carried away from a broken window pieces of oyster-shell and mother-of-pearl as mementos. He took pains to write also in his Memoirs that the house she lived in at Tellicherry was still standing in 1812. Belvidere House, at Mazagon, overlooking the harbour at Bombay—the house from an upper window of which Eliza escaped by a rope ladder to the ship of Sir John Clark—was long believed to be haunted by her spirit, “flitting about in corridor or verandah in hoop and farthingale.” Sketches of Belvidere were brought to England by J. B. Fraser, the traveller and explorer; and from them Robert Burford painted a panorama^[2] for public exhibition in London. For nearly a century, it is said, a tree on the estate of her uncle Tom Whitehill at Masulipatam was called Eliza’s tree in memory of her sojourn there.