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    The American
    The American
    The American
    Ebook501 pages8 hours

    The American

    By Henry James, Lee Clark Mitchell and Leon Edel

    3.5/5

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    Henry James brilliantly combines comedy, tragedy, romance, and melodrama in this tale of a wealthy American businessman in Paris. Determined to marry Claire de Cintré, a scintillating and beautiful aristocrat, Christopher Newman comes up against the machinations of her impoverished but proud family in a dramatic clash between the Old World and the New. A co-production with the BBC, starring Diana Rigg, Matthew Modine, and Brenda Fricker.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 4, 2005
    ISBN9781101157626
    Author

    Henry James

    Henry James (1843–1916) was an American writer, highly regarded as one of the key proponents of literary realism, as well as for his contributions to literary criticism. His writing centres on the clash and overlap between Europe and America, and The Portrait of a Lady is regarded as his most notable work.

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    Reviews for The American

    3.5/5

    264 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      [The American] was both a psychological and sociological description of an American in Paris coming up against the aristocratic society of France. He sees an aristocratic woman as the convenient ideal wife and then becomes obsessed by her once their marriage is denied.
    • 4/5
      4.5 stars



      James makes great headway from Roderick Hudson, where he really begins to hone his dialogue; here, in The American, one almost feels the influence of Trollope on the first half of the novel—the society scenes, the scenes of being lost in crowds, the dialogue that is suggestive rather than overt—all while making Paris come alive for the reader in such a way that we’re able to see it through Christopher Newman’s eyes as a privileged, hard-working, status-obsessed American who’s earned his millions and is taking the Continental tour. Love and Old World tradition sidetrack him, as do a few well-drawn characters who come and go at literally just the right times: in other hands, these characters would be mere caricatures, but in James’s hands, the balance is struck and the bell tolls, tolls, tolls. 



      This novel sees him much more masterful with his dialogue measured equally with the interiority/figural narratives that place us inside (mostly) Newman’s head as he navigates the Old—but new-to-him—World of tradition, religion, society, and a pride he can’t wholly fathom. The scenes in the Louvre are some of the most breathtaking scenes in James’s work thus far—as I begin to re-read his novels in order, as this mad project of mine—and the countryside of France comes alive, too, in a suffocating, claustrophobic manner that suits the plot and the theme of The American to the letter.



      And that ending! What perfection, with the mise-en-scène and the dialogic build-up! And there is a kind of behind-the-curtains duel! And nuns! And backstabbing aplenty… but the latter is James for you, almost across the board. James begins his ambiguity here, in part, and his fascination with a particular classical element that figures heavily in much of his novels and short fiction. 


      On to The Europeans which I recall feeling was one of his weaker earlier novels (it is, after all, subtitled A Sketch), but perhaps my mind will change after many years away from it, and on the heels of his previous three novels—yes, I count Watch and Ward, though James later disowned it.
    • 5/5
      The American as one of the early novels of Henry James does not have as many readers or enjoy as much popularity as the later novels. Still, by all means, The American is a very good novel, and would serve very well as an introduction to the later, more mature novels.

      The American has all the elements of the later novels. The contrast between the lack of sophistication of the American nouveau riche versus the decadence of the old, European aristocracy. Life in the great salons of the European metropolises versus trips to Geneva and other pleasurable holiday destinations. As The American is one of James's early novels to explore this theme it is also explorative of the features of the exchange of cultures, American versus European, while the motives are still somewhat superficial, as opposed to the psychological drama of the later novels. In addition to that, The American has a rich plot, with various, unexpected turns.

      I did not like the secundary plot, which in a way explores the same motive from a mirrorred perspective of not so very sophisticated Europeans looking for their luck with Americans, but perhaps it was needed to connect some elements of the story. It gives the novel a slight Dickensian "Tale of Two Cities" character.

      Upon completion, I felt I would have hoped to have known of this novel when I started reading Henry James, and not necessarily, as most people, through the shorter fiction.
    • 4/5
      I wonder how much Newman loves Claire. He seems to love more the ideal lady that she represents. Newman has everything and is so rich he can just idle his days away and has not a worry. He just needs a trophy lady to embellish his life. Reading Newman's travels through Europe also evokes memories of my own travel in the continent, and I wish I can be like him - traveling at will! That will have to wait till the pandemic is over.
    • 3/5
      I realize, now, that the tedium of James's exposition emerges from his telling us who his characters are much more than he shows us. In this case, however, his prose is much less baroque and the plot sufficiently compelling.
    • 3/5
      I decided to pick up this old classic piece of literature and give it a try. One of the things I wonder sometimes is how books move from being unquestioned parts of the Canon to being afterthoughts, and I think this is an example. It's a product of its time, and gives some insight into what life among the French aristocracy was like in the late 19th century; great literature takes a particular story set in a particular place, and leaves one struck by the universality of the themes. I would imagine this accomplished that at one time, but I'm not sure how relevant it feels in the 21st century.

      The title refers to an American, Newman, a fabulously wealthy businessman living in Paris and mixing with the French elite in the 1870s. He falls in love with Claire de Cintre, a young widow born of the Bellegarde's, an aristocratic old French family. He courts and becomes engaged to her before her mother and brother intervene to try to stop the marriage to a mere mercantilist, wealthy though he may be.

      And one striking thing is how incredibly wealthy he is- he has apparently made so much money that he can live a life of leisure indefinitely.

      One complaint is that the book starts with Newman in Paris, and gives very little backstory. It explains that he is of a very calm and pleasant disposition, which is actually quite important to the plot at the end, but it doesn't really explain why he is like that, which would have been more interesting.

      Anyway, the book moves slowly, with long bouts of dialogue. James turns a phrase well, and there are some good descriptions of scenery, but generally I think this book deserves to have been dropped from the canon. Lots of great new books get written every year, and though we shouldn't stop reading Steinbeck just yet, I think James can be consigned to a little corner of obscure writers that were once famous.
    • 3/5
      This is a long novel that boiled down to a bunch of annoyingly dense, tradition-laden, foolish people making stupid choices to avoid accepting good things that they already know they want to accept. If the characters weren't so dumb, the book would have been a novella or a short story, and far more likable.
    • 4/5
      Recommended by a book on writing. Henry James has an engaging detail of description, yet in this novel, the story is alternatively dramatic and romantic, showing both flaws and features. The development takes as many turns as a mountain road on the Tour de France, but with more enjoyment.
    • 5/5
      Prompted by a sudden disgust for a payback stock market revenge, the central character of Henry James' novel, "The American"; Christopher Newman, who made his fortune in San-Francisco, becomes a reversed Christopher Columbus and discovers Europe, a continent made for him.
    • 4/5
      One of his better works, but still not great. It appears as though his earlier works were better written. By the time I got to "The Wings of the Dove" (1902) I had grown tired of him. By the end of his career, there wasn't a simple action or thought that he couldn't convey in an unending stream of words. His mantra seemed to be, "I could be succinct, but why? I enjoy writing. I couldn't give a damn whether I burden the reader with my verbal diarrhea." A highly overrated writer, maybe because he was an ex-patriot.
    • 5/5
      I'd only read 'the Europeans' of the early James before this. That was good, but hey, it's really short, not much he could do. This is justly celebrated. Not one to read if you're after a black and white morality tale about the evils of American Commercialism - which does end up looking a bit empty - or the evils of European stuffiness - which does end up looking more than a bit evil; or the great goodness (both also look good in their own way) of either of them. And that's what the book is about. It's not much of a love story, if that's what you're after.

      I wonder what it would be like reading this as an American? Hmmm....
    • 4/5
      While the James's rigid stylistic control over language is dated, the story line and characters are well developed.
    • 3/5
      This was my introduction to the novels of Henry James. I first read this book in my American Literature course in college and remember the experience to this day. Starting with his second novel, Roderick Hudson, Henry James featured mostly American characters in a European setting. James made the Europe–America contrast even more explicit in his next novel. In fact, the contrast could be considered the leading theme of The American. This book is a combination of social comedy and melodrama concerning the adventures and misadventures of Christopher Newman, an essentially good-hearted but rather gauche American businessman on his first tour of Europe. Newman is looking for a world different from the simple, harsh realities of 19th century American business. He encounters both the beauty and the ugliness of Europe, and learns not to take either for granted. Coming as it did as my first taste of reading Henry James it laid the groundwork for my enjoyment of many of his more mature novels.
    • 5/5
      America meets France meets England in this transporting novel of suspense by the transatlantic master of mysteries of the heart. When American millionaire Christopher Newman travels to Paris to find the perfect bride, he is plunged into a perfect storm of intrigue. His bold pursuit of the woman he loves is met with icy opposition and fatal secrets.
    • 5/5
      When I finished reading this book on May 4, 1963, I said to myself: "A work of consummate skill. The last third of the book caught me up--maybe because I had grown used to its style. Christoper Newman's final walk from the Carmelite convent to Notre Dame, and his visit thereto, are expertly done: "He wandered some distance up the nave and sat down in the splendid dimness. He sat a long time; he heard far away bells chiming off into space, at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word..." On May 25, 1963 I made a postscript to this enrty: ":in Leon Edel's Volume II of his biography of James : "He goes to Notre Dame, and sitting there, he hears 'far away bells chiming off, at long intervals, to the rest fo the world,' [Into his revision of this passage many years later Henry infused more poetry, speaking of 'far away bells chiming off into space at long intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word'}] and decides that revenge isn't his game.'"

    Book preview

    The American - Henry James

    Introduction

    The American (1877), Henry James’s first novelistic triumph, signaled the directions he would take through a long career as America’s most distinguished novelist. He was our first modernist author, and the novel gives early indications of James’s turn toward a modernist ethos, anticipating Joyce, Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf in establishing literature as a self-conscious, active negotiation between author and reader, in which (as James famously declared) the reader does quite half the labor. By this, he meant that the facts of a story were no longer simply laid out to be interpreted after the fact, but that even bare initial facts were shaped, sometimes created, to fit our interpretive assumptions, our notions of common sense. The most familiar such assumptions occur as binary oppositions (living-dead, innocent-guilty, black-white, male-female), and over and over in novels and stories, James returned to a well-known thematic structure that exposed those oppositions as no other could. This structure, referred to as the international theme, presents an innocent American abroad, self-confident, apparently free, confronted by a European world of fixed institutions and constraining cultural codes.

    Long before James, that theme had sparked American writers’ creative musings, beginning with Ben Franklin’s wry memoir of life in Paris, and continuing in Mark Twain’s account of bumptious innocents abroad. Later, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, in narratives of disillusioned postwar expatriates, gave a further twist to the opposition of American independence and European conventionality, of innocent Americans entangled in a European world of dark immorality. But James performs the most complex inversion of the international theme—beginning with The American, then elaborated in The Portrait of a Lady, and explored most fully in the late masterpieces that culminate in The Golden Bowl—by presenting innocent victims victimized less by a corrupt social world than by their own two-dimensional conceptions of life. For James, no one’s language is neutral, natural, or otherwise one with reality, and accounts are therefore never transparent, helping explain why our interest in his novels focuses on the accounts characters create for themselves, especially accounts that seem mis leadingly obvious and nonpartisan. Innocence thus becomes less an absence of assumptions than simply another set of fixed attitudes. In short, words mirror the world far less than they create the tensions and values by which we measure what we see. And because characters so actively contribute to what they see, the interest of the international theme lies in the drama that results not simply from European oppression of victimized Americans, but from Americans’ psychological enslavement to their own simplistic notions of behavior. Over and over, James returned to this conflict between two ways of viewing experience.

    The very title of The American reveals James’s fascination with the grip that common stereotypes have on us. And even though the idea of national types no longer seems obvious today, the line of thought is not hard to recover, especially given James’s spoofing of the range of presumed national behaviors. American innocence is exposed in Christopher Newman’s very name as well as in the buffoonish conduct of his compatriot Tom Tristram. French savoir faire is similarly dramatized in the emblematic Urbain de Bellegarde, as is English eccentricity in Lord Deepmere. Even German boorishness is punctured in the person of Stanislas Kapp, the dueling brewer’s son. More generally, all Europeans are represented as fixed figures in a closed society where constraints of class, gender, race, and nationality determine one’s life—in contrast to the free American who emerges from a society where constraints seem invisible and all things seem possible. James is less interested in social realities (of which he was perfectly aware) than in characteristic perceptions, helping explain the almost allegorical quality to Newman’s characterization as a frank, hospitable, generous, large-minded figure not given to bitterness or deception. Repeatedly, he is pictured standing at his ease, with legs stretched out, in poised self-assurance, tak ing mental possession of the scene—as if the world lay before him for his delectation. By contrast, Madame de Bellegarde and her son Urbain are represented as static, unnaturally guarded figures, embodied in the marquise’s very mouth: that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an ‘Oh dear, no’ (p. 128).

    If from one perspective the novel seems written in an allegorical mode—with figures flattened into stereotypes all but defined by their names—from another, the novel plays tricks with that flatness, as if James again were showing how nothing is what it seems at first glance. Consider the opening descriptive assurance of Newman as a typical American, which within a page shifts into a tentative mode as the narrator considers the appearance of his face:

    The discriminating observer we have been supposing might, however, perfectly have measured its expressiveness, and yet have been at a loss to describe it. It had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one’s own disposal, so characteristic of many American faces. It was our friend’s eye that chiefly told his story; an eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions; and though it was by no means the glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy, extremely intelligent and extremely good-humoured, there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve.

    (p. 5)

    Having begun with the assumption of Newman as a representative American, the narrator then thrusts into a disorienting series of oppositions and negations in a description that suddenly becomes nuanced, provisional, open to the sheer ambiguity of the stranger standing before him. There is a sense right off that we as readers are being taught how to read character—indeed, how to read each other—from a position not of assured omniscience but rather of partial knowledge and admitted uncertainty.

    Throughout, the anonymous narrator will preclude Newman being seen objectively by regularly acknowledging the limits to his own partial view; he makes con jectures, indulges in probable depictions, and habitually admits to ignorance of Newman’s motives and desires (often punctuating descriptions with I know not, or I am unable to say, or I confess myself unable to determine). Indeed, one of the more mysterious moments in the novel occurs when Newman gives his traveling companion, Benjamin Babcock, a grotesque little statuette of a monk with a capon hanging inside his tattered gown. The narrator queries, In Newman’s intention what did the figure symbolise? (p. 70), but he never ventures to tell us. Throughout, he regularly refrains from judging his hero’s beliefs or intentions, reflecting instead a due regard for Newman’s personal sovereignty. That interpretive astuteness stands in marked contrast to Newman’s penchant for easy assessments and blunt negotiations: first, with the pretty young copyist in the Louvre, Noémie Nioche, for her half-finished painting; then, with her father for lessons in French. The comical crudeness of these exchanges, with Newman speaking no French and Noémie little English, offers a strange contrast to the discriminating narrator who represents the scenes. Already, we get the impression that the novel’s deepest binary opposition may lie not between the free American and fixed Europeans but between those who believe in any such easy binary division and those who do not.

    If most of the characters fall into the former category, readily reducing others to stock figures, one character resembles the narrator in her sensitivity to contradictions in others, and who thereby is able to generate interestingly equivocal assessments from them. Mrs. Tristram has a husband who cannot tell when she is in jest or in earnest (p. 26), which is just what Newman feels about her. Though a minor character, she is almost alone in entertaining a wide variety of views, and in registering a discriminating, often ironic, judgment. Tellingly, she brings Newman and Claire de Cintré together, as one might if writing one’s own novel; but more important is the way she incarnates the narrator’s fluent, conditional perspective. At one point, the narrator himself observes this, wondering if Mrs. Tristram is jealous of Claire, given her own affection for Newman:

    We may be permitted to doubt it. The inconsistent little lady of the Avenue d’Iéna had an insuperable need of changing her place, intellectually. She had a lively imagination, and she was capable, at certain times, of imagining the direct reverse of her most cherished beliefs, with a vividness more intense than that of conviction. She got tired of thinking aright; but there was no serious harm in it, as she got equally tired of thinking wrong. (pp. 124-25)

    This negative capability (as Keats termed it) means that Mrs. Tristram can inhabit another imaginatively, with the power to sense from partial accounts and multiple possibilities what is actually happening, how those of alien temperament are feeling, and what they are likely to do. She is the first in a long line of Jamesian women wonderfully astute about the world, sliding into others’ perspectives because of their status as disempowered women, either impoverished or badly married, and thus required to learn how to read behavior from partial signs and imperfect evidence. Their shrewdness as readers becomes a standard against which others—and we, as well—are measured.

    The American presents Christopher Newman as an attractive figure—someone who wins the regard of the two most notable women in the novel (Mrs. Tristram and Claire de Cintré)—yet also as a character unable to break with his own firm assumptions. In that sense, he is the opposite of Mrs. Tristram, registering American innocence as less the absence of assumptions than the dogged assertion of ideals he simply presumes everyone else must share. Newman is among the earliest in a long line of fictional American businessmen, and in him, James creates the classic capitalist for whom worth is measured in quantifiable market value. That attitude colors Newman’s view of everything, driving him to possess the biggest rooms, to see the most churches (470 in a summer), and to buy an excessive number of painted copies from Noémie Nioche (unaware of their quality—indeed, unaware of the larger claims of art at all, never having read a novel or seen a play). Appropriately, his first word in the novel is Combien? (How much?) (p. 6), which informs his view of matrimony itself. Pre sent me to a woman who comes up to my notions . . . and I will marry her to-morrow. As he then elaborates to Mrs. Tristram, I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market (p. 36). This crudely commercial view of a spouse informs his earliest meetings with Claire de Cintré, who rises in his esteem partly because others value her as they do. And after his proposal is accepted and his vanity reinforced, he indulges in countless telegrams to friends bubbling over with self-satisfaction. So we soon share Noémie’s incredulity at his lack of imagination: I don’t understand how a man can be so ignorant (p. 58).

    Newman’s courtship of Claire highlights for James the greatest adventure, since the process of mutual reading (and misreading) that leads to marriage offers the most daring, most complex, most intense version of all relationships. We come to realize that people and events do not fit neat categories, and that categories must always be reimagined and renegotiated. Newman hopes simply to possess Claire, even though from the beginning he acknowledges (if without understanding) those contradictions in her that resist easy assessment, much less understanding. He first notices something painful in her smile (p. 87) that is later compounded by other inconsistencies—though such testaments to her indefinable elusiveness only give Newman false license to imagine the Claire he desires. Her vagueness serves as warrant, allowing him as it did to fill it out mentally, both at the time and afterwards, with such meaning as most pleased him (p. 100). While the process of their courtship does inspire a suitable caution in such habits of projection—making Newman at first more hesitant, less abrupt and reductive—he finally cannot avoid the deep contradiction embodied in the marriage of a stalwart American businessman and a demure French countess. The two, as a couple, emerge as a kind of oxymoron (or contradiction in terms), as he comes to represent everything she does not.

    Even more than Newman’s blindness to this disparity is his contradictory notion of marriage itself as an institution. As he says to Claire, you ought to be perfectly free, and marriage will make you so (p. 121). Yet the idea of a free marriage is as strange a conjunction as any other in the novel, suggesting a contract that does not bind contractually (in a novel filled with contracts and bonds), an oxymoron that cannot be sustained. One way to understand Claire’s final reneging on her decision, then, is as her realization of that fact—that Newman is too forceful a character to be a partner in an equal arrangement, lacking the tentativeness and reciprocity needed to make any such marriage of opposites work. At almost no point are we able to understand how the two might overcome their differences to establish a truly reciprocal marriage. And as Newman becomes more self-satisfied at his successful courtship of Claire, he becomes ever more convinced of his own perspective, ever less tentative about hers.

    In short, Newman epitomizes James’s inversion of the international theme, as a stereotypically innocent American who becomes as much self-victimizer as victim. The novel plays out not only cultural differences between Europe and America but, more important, interpretive differences among a variety of readers. Newman reads others crudely, treating Claire as a simple ideal, erasing her as a distinct person with her own distinctive limits and strengths, denying her a fleshed-out particularity, ignoring her hesitations and silences. A prominent revelation of this—and invariably a giveaway of moral character in James—is his marriage proposal. Newman’s proposal (like those of other Jamesian heroes, with equally problematic results) abounds in references to himself, in reiterated first-person appeals that all endorse his own desires rather than posing an effort to read hers more adequately (see page 118). Later, when she comes to explain her rejection of the possibility of marriage to him, it will be in terms of his initial and continuing misreading of her (see page 275).

    The American might best be understood, then, as Newman’s turn from the possibility of a flexible and contradictory assessment of experience to a firm, fixed reading. And as he succumbs to a logic of binary oppositions, the novel itself grows more melodramatic in a shift so dramatic that it has surprised readers from the beginning. Keep in mind that melodrama is a theatrical mode featuring sharp divisions in value, with sensational evil in the guise of mustachioed villains opposed by the purity of wide-eyed ingenues. The latter half of The American conforms to this pattern, abruptly derailing the social comedy of the opening chapters by an intrusion of dark secrets, a violent duel, a ruthless murder by poison, and the appearance of a family divided treacherously against itself. Yet the modernist James was always convinced that melodrama is not simply a theatrical mode but a more general form of consciousness that tends to see evil where only chaos exists—to discover nefarious plots wherever chance or coincidence occurs. And in this light, it is interesting that Newman himself first entertains melodramatic possibilities that are borne out in the novel’s second half. He is the one to conjecture that the marquise has murdered someone while her eldest son stood by, and upon meeting the family retainer Mrs. Bread, he finds his fantastical view confirmed. Later, he feels in the presence of something evil (p. 242) when he learns Claire has been pressured against him, and becomes more convinced of a devious crime that has driven her to seek refuge in a convent. The novel, in short, plays out as actual events those melodramatic possibilities that Newman has begun by only imagining.

    Given James’s interest in how each of us creates meaning—reading and shaping our lives through prejudiced lenses—it may not be surprising that Newman thus seems to bring forth his own life through imagined fears, creating himself as a wronged hero of melodrama. Once the Bellegardes abrogate their contract with him, he adopts the role of good fellow wronged (p. 282), assuming Claire has taken vows only because she wants to escape her mother and brother. And he takes her announcement of that decision as a deliberate affront to his own happiness: To see a woman made for him and for motherhood to his children juggled away in this tragic travesty—it was a thing to rub one’s eyes over, a nightmare, an illusion, a hoax (p. 283). The very ego centrism of this response, however, relegating Claire to ancillary status in his own nightmare, introduces the prospect that she is escaping as much from Newman as from her family—from anyone, everyone who wants to impose their conceptions, their assumptions, their interpretations on her. Her choice of the Carmelites, requiring a vow of silence broken only by religious chants, releases her from any constraints others might try to impose. In fact, her choice at the end makes explicit the enforced silence that life would become, whether with her mother or with Newman. Newman, of course, fails to understand this or to recognize the irony in his question: How could she fail to perceive that his house would be much the most comfortable sort of convent? (p. 284).

    James makes a shrewd novelistic move, then, in allowing Newman to realize the extent of Claire’s exile from the world first as an aural event—as the utter absence of her distinctive voice. He visits the nunnery where she is now installed:

    Suddenly there arose from the depths of the chapel, from behind the inexorable grating, a sound which drew his attention from the altar—the sound of a strange, lugubrious chant uttered by women’s voices. . . . [A]s it increased it became a wail and a dirge. It was the chant of the Carmelite nuns, their only human utterance. It was their dirge over their buried affections and over the vanity of earthly desires. At first Newman was bewildered—almost stunned—by the strangeness of the sound. (p. 321)

    This forms a weirdly disturbing moment (one of the most distressing in James), with Claire at last free behind a wall of linguistic silence—no longer to be possessed intellectually, verbally, physically, not even to be imagined. She exists simply as an impersonal wail (p. 322).

    There have been many readings of Christopher Newman and Claire de Cintré in the years since James first published The American, which in its briefest plot summary is about a stranger in a strange land trying to interpret events around him—looking for a wife, acting vigorously to achieve that end, but also caught up trying to read appropriate signs. For James’s triumph, in this his first great novel, is to create a fast-moving, sus penseful narrative that is also self-consciously a story about interpretation, revealing how even the best, most self-confident actors always act from assumptions, from words, from verbal plots that are as revealing in what they leave out as what they include. Words are the way in which we possess one another, and the more refined, more tentative, more discriminating our approach, the more adequate it is to others and their differences from us. Christopher Newman seems unaware throughout of his own effect on others, and that is registered in his bewilderment at various dinners and parties, his final dismay at Claire’s decision, his confusion by so much that occurs. As more sophisticated readers ourselves, we should be able to answer questions that plague him, but it is always a matter of resisting our own initial assumptions in the process of listening carefully to the characters and the narratives we repeatedly fail to understand.

    —Lee Clark Mitchell

    Chapter 1

    On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts; but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guidebook and an opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead, with a somewhat wearied gesture. And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigour that is commonly known as toughness. But his exertions on this particular day had been of an unwonted sort, and he had often performed great physical feats which left him less jaded than his tranquil stroll through the Louvre. He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed in those formidable pages of fine print in his Bäd eker; his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an aesthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces; and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original. His physiognomy would have sufficiently indicated that he was a shrewd and capable fellow, and in truth he had often sat up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind of arithmetic, and they inspired our friend, for the first time in his life, with a vague self-mistrust.

    An observer, with anything of an eye for national types, would have had no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould. The gentleman on the divan was a powerful specimen of an American. But he was not only a fine American; he was in the first place, physically, a fine man. He appeared to possess that kind of health and strength which, when found in perfection, are the most impressive—the physical capital which the owner does nothing to keep up. If he was a muscular Christian, it was quite without knowing it. If it was necessary to walk to a remote spot, he walked, but he had never known himself to exercise. He had no theory with regard to cold bathing or the use of Indian clubs; he was neither an oarsman, a rifleman, nor a fencer—he had never had time for these amusements—and he was quite unaware that the saddle is recommended for certain forms of indigestion. He was by inclination a temperate man; but he had supped the night before his visit to the Louvre at the Café Anglais—someone had told him it was an experience not to be omitted—and he had slept none the less the sleep of the just. His usual attitude and carriage were of a rather relaxed and lounging kind, but when, under a special inspiration, he straightened himself, he looked like a grenadier on parade. He never smoked. He had been assured—such things are said—that cigars were excellent for the health, and he was quite capable of believing it; but he knew as little about tobacco as about homeopathy. He had a very well-formed head, with a shapely, symmetrical balance of the frontal and the occipital development, and a good deal of straight, rather dry brown hair. His complexion was brown, and his nose had a bold, well-marked arch. His eye was of a clear, cold gray, and, save for a rather abundant moustache, he was clean-shaved. He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type; but the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend’s countenance was supremely eloquent. The discriminating observer we have been supposing might, however, perfectly have measured its expressiveness, and yet have been at a loss to describe it. It had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one’s own disposal, so characteristic of many American faces. It was our friend’s eye that chiefly told his story; an eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions; and though it was by no means the glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy, extremely intelligent and extremely good-humoured, there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve. The cut of this gentleman’s moustache, with the two premature wrinkles in the cheek above it, and the fashion of his garments, in which an exposed shirt-front and a cerulean cravat played perhaps an obtrusive part, completed the conditions of his identity. We have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favourable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the aesthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea, in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.

    As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and then a responsive glance toward her admirer. The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of by-play, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the gentleman we have described. At last he rose abruptly, put on his hat, and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate his meaning, Combien? he abruptly demanded.

    The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders, put down her palette and brushes, and stood rubbing her hands.

    How much? said our friend, in English. Combien?

    Monsieur wishes to buy it? asked the young lady, in French.

    "Very pretty, splendide. Combien?" repeated the American.

    It pleases monsieur, my little picture? It’s a very beautiful subject, said the young lady.

    "The Madonna, yes; I am not a Catholic, but I want to buy it. Combien? Write it here. And he took a pencil from his pocket, and showed her the fly-leaf of his guide book. She stood looking at him and scratching her chin with the pencil. Is it not for sale? he asked. And as she still stood reflecting, and looking at him with an eye which, in spite of her desire to treat this avidity of patronage as a very old story, betrayed an almost touching incredulity, he was afraid he had offended her. She was simply trying to look indifferent, and wondering how far she might go. I haven’t made a mistake—pas insulté, no? her interlocutor continued. Don’t you understand a little English?"

    The young lady’s aptitude for playing a part at short notice was remarkable. She fixed him with her conscious, perceptive eye, and asked him if he spoke no French. Then, Donnez! she said briefly, and took the open guide-book. In the upper corner of the fly-leaf she traced a number, in a minute and extremely neat hand. Then she handed back the book, and took up her palette again.

    Our friend read the number: 2,000 francs. He said nothing for a time, but stood looking at the picture, while the copyist began actively to dabble with her paint, For a copy, isn’t that a good deal? he asked at last. Pas beaucoup?

    The young lady raised her eyes from her palette, scanned him from head to foot, and alighted with admirable sagacity upon exactly the right answer. Yes, it’s a good deal. But my copy has remarkable qualities; it is worth nothing less.

    The gentleman in whom we are interested understood no French, but I have said he was intelligent, and here is a good chance to prove it. He apprehended, by a natural instinct, the meaning of the young woman’s phrase, and it gratified him to think that she was so honest. Beauty, talent, virtue; she combined everything! But you must finish it, he said. "Finish, you know," and he pointed to the unpainted hand of the figure.

    Oh, it shall be finished in perfection—in the perfection of perfections! cried mademoiselle; and to confirm her promise, she deposited a rosy blotch in the middle of the Madonna’s cheek.

    But the American frowned. Ah, too red, too red! he rejoined. Her complexion, pointing to the Murillo, is more delicate.

    "Delicate? Oh, it shall be delicate, monsieur; delicate as Sèvres biscuit. I am going to tone that down; I know all the secrets of my art. And where will you allow us to send it to you? Your address?"

    My address? Oh yes! And the gentleman drew a card from his pocketbook and wrote something upon it. Then hesitating a moment he said: If I don’t like it when it is finished, you know, I shall not be obliged to take it.

    The young lady seemed as good a guesser as himself. Oh, I am very sure that monsieur is not capricious, she said with a roguish smile.

    Capricious? And at this monsieur began to laugh. "Oh no, I’m not capricious. I am very faithful. I am very constant. Comprenez?"

    Monsieur is constant; I understand perfectly. It’s a rare virtue. To recompense you, you shall have your picture on the first possible day; next week—as soon as it is dry. I will take the card of monsieur. And she took it and read his name: Christopher Newman. Then she tried to repeat it aloud, and laughed at her bad accent. Your English names are so droll!

    Droll? said Mr. Newman, laughing too. Did you ever hear of Christopher Columbus?

    "Bien sûr! He invented America; a very great man. And is he your patron?"

    My patron?

    Your patron-saint in the calendar.

    Oh, exactly; my parents named me for him.

    Monsieur is American?

    Don’t you see it? monsieur inquired.

    And you mean to carry my little picture away over there? and she explained her phrase with a gesture.

    "Oh, I mean to buy a great many pictures—beaucoup, beaucoup," said Christopher Newman.

    The honour is not less for me, the young lady answered, for I am sure monsieur has a great deal of taste.

    But you must give me your card, Newman said; your card, you know.

    The young lady looked severe for an instant, and then said: My father will wait upon you.

    But this time Mr. Newman’s powers of divination were at fault. Your card, your address, he simply repeated.

    My address? said mademoiselle. Then, with a little shrug: Happily for you, you are an American! It is the first time I ever gave my card to a gentleman. And, taking from her pocket a rather greasy portmonnaie, she extracted from it a small glazed visiting card, and presented the latter to her patron. It was neatly inscribed in pencil, with a great many flourishes: Mlle. Noémie Nioche. But Mr. Newman, unlike his companion, read the name with perfect gravity; all French names to him were equally droll.

    And precisely, here is my father, who has come to escort me home, said Mademoiselle Noémie. He speaks English. He will arrange with you. And she turned to welcome a little old gentleman who came shuffling up, peering over his spectacles at Newman.

    M. Nioche wore a glossy wig, of an unnatural colour, which overhung his little meek, white, vacant face, and left it hardly more expressive than the unfeatured block upon which these articles are displayed in the barber’s window. He was an exquisite image of shabby gentility. His little ill-made coat, desperately brushed, his darned gloves, his highly-polished boots, his rusty, shapely hat, told the story of a person who had had losses, and who clung to the spirit of nice habits, though the letter had been hopelessly effaced. Among other things M. Nioche had lost courage. Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates. If this strange gentleman was saying anything improper to his daughter, M. Nioche would entreat him huskily, as a particular favour, to forbear; but he would admit at the same time that he was very presumptuous to ask for particular favours.

    Monsieur has bought my picture, said Mademoiselle Noémie. When it is finished you will carry it to him in a cab.

    In a cab! cried M. Nioche; and he stared, in a bewildered way, as if he had seen the sun rising at midnight.

    Are you the young lady’s father? said Newman. I think she said you speak English.

    Speak English—yes, said the old man, slowly rubbing his hands. I will bring it in a cab.

    Say something, then, cried his daughter. Thank him a little—not too much.

    A little, my daughter, a little, said M. Nioche, perplexed. How much?

    Two thousand! said Mademoiselle Noémie. Don’t make a fuss, or he will take back his word.

    Two thousand! cried the old man; and he began to fumble for his snuff-box. He looked at Newman, from head to foot, at his daughter, and then at the picture. Take care you don’t spoil it! he cried, almost sublimely.

    We must go home, said Mademoiselle Noémie. This is a good day’s work. Take care how you carry it! And she began to put up her utensils.

    How can I thank you? said M. Nioche. My English does not suffice.

    I wish I spoke French as well, said Newman, good-naturedly. Your daughter is very clever.

    Oh sir! and M. Nioche looked over his spectacles with tearful eyes and nodded several times with a world of sadness. "She has had an education—très-supérieure! Nothing was spared. Lessons in pastel at ten francs the lesson, lessons in oil at twelve francs. I didn’t look at the francs then. She’s an artiste, eh?"

    Do I understand you to say that you have had reverses? asked Newman.

    Reverses? Oh sir, misfortunes—terrible!

    Unsuccessful in business, eh?

    Very unsuccessful, sir.

    Oh, never fear, you’ll get on your legs again, said Newman cheerily.

    The old man drooped his head on one side and looked at him with an expression of pain, as if this were an unfeeling jest.

    What does he say? demanded Mademoiselle Noémie.

    M. Nioche took a pinch of snuff. He says I will make my fortune again.

    Perhaps he will help you. And what else?

    He says thou art very clever.

    It is very possible. You believe it yourself, my father?

    Believe it, my daughter? With this evidence! and the old man turned afresh, with a staring, wondering homage, to the audacious daub on the easel.

    Ask him, then, if he would not like to learn French.

    To learn French?

    To take lessons.

    To take lessons, my daughter? From thee?

    From you!

    From me, my child? How should I give lessons?

    "Pas de raisons! Ask him immediately!" said Mademoiselle Noémie, with soft brevity.

    M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter’s eye he collected his wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her commands. Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful language? he inquired, with an appealing quaver.

    To study French? asked Newman, staring.

    M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his shoulders. A little conversation!

    Conversation—that’s it! murmured Mademoiselle Noémie, who had caught the word. The conversation of the best society.

    Our French conversation is famous, you know, M. Nioche ventured to continue. It’s a great talent.

    But isn’t it awfully difficult? asked Newman, very simply.

    "Not to a man of esprit, like monsieur, an admirer of beauty in every form!" and M. Nioche cast a significant glance at his daughter’s Madonna.

    I can’t fancy myself chattering French! said Newman with a laugh. And yet, I suppose that the more a man knows the better.

    "Monsieur expresses that very happily. Hélas, oui!"

    I suppose it would help me a great deal, knocking about Paris, to know the language.

    Ah, there are so many things monsieur must want to say: difficult things!

    Everything I want to say is difficult. But you give lessons?

    Poor M. Nioche was embarrassed; he smiled more appealingly. I am not a regular professor, he admitted. I can’t nevertheless tell him that I’m a professor, he said to his daughter.

    Tell him it’s a very exceptional chance, answered Mademoiselle Noémie; "an homme du monde—one gentleman conversing with another! Remember what you are—what you have been!"

    A teacher of languages in neither case! Much more formerly and much less to-day! And if he asks the price of the lessons?

    He won’t ask it, said Mademoiselle Noémie.

    What he pleases, I may say?

    Never! That’s bad style.

    If he asks, then?

    Mademoiselle Noémie had put on her bonnet and was tying the ribbons. She smoothed them out, with her soft little chin thrust forward. Ten francs, she said quickly.

    Oh, my daughter! I shall never dare.

    Don’t dare, then! He won’t ask till the end of the lessons, and then I will make out the bill.

    M. Nioche turned to the confiding foreigner again, and stood rubbing his hands, with an air of seeming to plead guilty which was not intenser only because it was habitually so striking. It never occurred to Newman to ask him for a guarantee of his skill in imparting instruction; he supposed of course M. Nioche knew his own language, and his appealing forlornness was quite the perfection of what the American, for vague reasons, had always associated with all elderly foreigners of the lesson-giving class. Newman had never reflected upon philological processes. His chief impression with regard to ascertaining those mysterious correlatives of his familiar English vocables which were current in this extraordinary city of Paris was, that it was simply a matter of a good deal of unwonted and rather ridiculous muscular effort on his own part. How did you learn English? he asked of the old man.

    "When I was young, before my miseries. Oh, I was wide awake, then. My father was a great commerçant; he placed me for a year in a counting-house in England. Some of it stuck to me; but I have forgotten!"

    How much French can I learn in a month?

    What does he say? asked Mademoiselle Noémie.

    M. Nioche explained.

    He will speak like an angel! said his daughter.

    But the native integrity which had been vainly exerted to secure M. Nioche’s commercial prosperity flickered up again. "Dame, monsieur! he answered. All I can teach you! And then, recovering himself at a sign from his daughter, I will wait upon you at your hotel."

    Oh yes, I should like to learn French, Newman went on, with democratic confidingness. Hang me if I should ever have thought of it! I took for granted it was impossible. But if you learned my language, why shouldn’t I learn yours? and his frank, friendly laugh drew the sting from the jest. Only, if we are going to converse, you know, you must think of something cheerful to converse about.

    You are very good, sir; I am overcome! said M. Nioche, throwing out his hands. But you have cheerfulness and happiness for two!

    Oh no, said Newman more seriously. You must be bright and lively; that’s part of the bargain.

    M. Nioche bowed, with his hand on his heart. Very well, sir; you have already made me lively.

    Come and bring me my picture then; I will pay you for it, and we will talk about that. That will be a cheerful subject!

    Mademoiselle Noémie had collected her accessories, and she gave the precious Madonna in charge to her father, who retreated backwards out of sight, holding it at arm’s-length and reiterating his obeisances. The young lady gathered her shawl about her like a perfect Parisienne, and it was with the smile of a Parisienne that she took leave of her patron.

    Chapter 2

    He wandered back to the divan and seated himself on the other side, in view of the great canvas on which Paul Veronese has depicted the marriage feast of Cana. Wearied as he was he found the picture entertaining; it had an illusion for him; it satisfied his conception, which was

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