CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
they were ten years ago, so Hastings House of the above description was very different to what it has become since Lord Curzon rescued it from impending fate, and converted it into a state "guest-house" for Indian princes and nobles. At that time it had been vacant for many years, and stood forlorn and deserted, cut off from the outer world by its own spacious grounds, a melancholy spectacle of decay and desolation. Still more marked must have been the difference when the house was in the early days of its splendour: all that taste could suggest and wealth could supply had been lavished on its adornment, and the gracious presence of the brilliant Mrs. Hastings, the "beloved Marian" for whom this shrine had been prepared, shed a charm over all.
That Hastings House is the actual house in which Warren Hastings lived at Alipore is now indisputably proved, but that honour has repeatedly been claimed for "Belvedere." The mistake originated with Mrs. Fay, who, writing in 1780, spoke of Mrs. Hastings as residing at Belvedere House. Mrs. Fay was the wife of a barrister, and accompanied her husband to Calcutta in 1780, from where she wrote a series of lively, if not very accurate letters, to her relatives in England. More than thirty years later, when the writer had experienced trials
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