Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/222

 and her mother left England and settled at Angoulême. Thence she wrote repeatedly to Wilkes and Hall-Stevenson, begging them to proceed with her father's biography. But they had no serious intention of gratifying her wish, and her letters remained unanswered. About 1771 mother and daughter removed to Alby on the Tarn in Languedoc. Mrs. Sterne was in bad health, probably suffering from a recurrence of her mental malady. Lydia made the acquaintance of Alexander Anne Medalle, son of a ‘receveur des décimes’ in the custom-house, who was a year her junior. On 28 April 1772 she abjured the protestant religion in the private chapel of the provost's house at Alby, and was married to the young man on the same day. The registers of Alby state that the marriage was ‘forcé, urgent,’ epithets to which the gloss is appended: ‘car alors la loi autorisait la recherche de la paternité’ (Inventaire des Archives Communales d'Alby). The words seem to cast a slur on Lydia's chastity. A son was born soon after the marriage. Lydia's mother, who, owing to continued illness, was absent from the wedding ceremony, died at Alby in the house of a doctor named Lionières (No. 9 Rue St. Antoine) in January 1773. Lydia's husband did not long survive (CROFT). In June 1775 the widowed Madame de Medalle arrived in London, and published in Oct., as a substitute for a biography, her father's letters to her and his friends, to which was prefixed, in the worst taste, a portrait of herself bending over a bust of her father. She then returned to the south of France, and soon died. On 19 Sept. 1783 her son, her only known child, died in the school of the Benedictines at Sorère, and it was stated at the time that the boy's mother predeceased him (Athenæum, 18 June and 2 July 1870). The legend that Madame de Medalle was, with her husband, a victim of the French revolution is apocryphal.

The later history of Sterne's Eliza was followed with interest by Sterne's admirers. On arriving at Bombay at the end of 1767, she made the best of the situation, and in 1769 removed with her husband to Tellichery, where he had been appointed chief of the factory. She acted as his amanuensis, and was not, despite the death of her son in England, unhappy there. She described the town as the Montpellier of India, and enjoyed the social distinction accorded her by both English settlers and natives (cf. Journal of Indian Art, January 1891, vol. iv. No. 33, letter from Mrs. Draper from Tellichery, April 1769, edited by Sir George Birdwood). Her main anxiety at Tellichery was due to the malicious conduct of Sterne's wife and daughter in threatening to publish her correspondence with Sterne. Every member of the family, including Sterne himself, whom she now declared to have been tainted with the ‘vices of injustice, meanness, and folly,’ became the subject of Mrs. Draper's warm denunciation. In 1771 Draper removed from Tellichery to fill the same post of chief of the factory at Surat. But intrigues at Bombay jeopardised his prospects. He was recalled thither in 1772, and was for a time without remunerative employment. Life in Bombay was increasingly irksome to Mrs. Draper as the chance of returning to England with a competency grew more remote. On 15 April 1772, in a long rambling letter to Mrs. James, she defended the attitude she had maintained to Sterne's family, and set forth in elaborate detail her impatience with her husband and Indian society, as well as her views on life and literature. At length, driven to desperation by her renewed antipathy to her husband, she fled on 12 Jan. 1773 from his house—called both Marine House and Belvidere House—at Mazagon, which overlooked Bombay Harbour (see her farewell letters in Times of India, 24 Feb. 1894). It is said that she was aided in her escape by Captain Sir John Clark, and let herself down to his ship by a rope from a window. But she denied, in letters to her friends at home, that she compromised herself in any other way. Mrs. Draper's disappearance created a sensation throughout India. Writs were taken out against Clark in the mayor's court at Bombay, but he eluded them successfully (, Memoirs, 1839). Mrs. Draper retired to the residence of her maternal uncle, Thomas Whitehill, at Rajahmundry, eighty miles from Masulipatam, and wrote home with composure of her contentment there, and of her intention to retaliate if Draper proceeded to extremities. A year later she returned to England. There she met Wilkes, William Combe [q. v.], and other literary men, and exercised over them some of her old fascination (cf., Table Talk, ed. Dyce, p. 117). Her pride in her relations with Sterne revived, and in February 1775—later in which year Sterne's daughter published some of his correspondence without making any reference to her—she authorised the publication, under the title of ‘Letters from Yorick to Eliza,’ of ten letters that Sterne had addressed to her between January and April 1767. The volume was dedicated to Lord-chancellor Apsley by an anonymous editor, who said he had copied the letters with Eliza's permission from the