The American (56 page)

If he had spoken it aloud he would have said that he didn’t want to hurt them. He was ashamed of having wanted to hurt them. They had hurt him, but such things were really not his game. At last he got up and came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man who has won a victory or taken a resolve, but strolling soberly, like a good-natured man who is still a little ashamed.

Going home, he said to Mrs. Bread that he must trouble her to put back his things into the portmanteau she had had unpacked the evening before. His gentle stewardess looked at him through eyes a trifle bedimmed. “Dear me, sir,” she exclaimed, “I thought you said that you were going to stay forever.”

“I meant that I was going to stay away forever,” said Newman kindly. And since his departure from Paris on the following day he has certainly not returned. The gilded apartments I have so often spoken of stand ready to receive him; but they serve only as a spacious residence for Mrs. Bread, who wanders eternally from room to room, adjusting the tassels of the curtains, and keeps her wages, which are regularly brought her by a banker’s
clerk, in a great pink Sèvres vase on the drawing-room mantelshelf.

Late in the evening Newman went to Mrs. Tristram’s and found Tom Tristram by the domestic fireside. “I’m glad to see you back in Paris,” this gentleman declared. “You know it’s really the only place for a white man to live.” Mr. Tristram made his friend welcome, according to his own rosy light, and offered him a convenient
résumé
of the Franco-American gossip of the last six months. Then at last he got up and said he would go for half an hour to the club. “I suppose a man who has been for six months in California wants a little intellectual conversation. I’ll let my wife have a go at you.”

Newman shook hands heartily with his host, but did not ask him to remain; and then he relapsed into his place on the sofa, opposite to Mrs. Tristram. She presently asked him what he had done after leaving her. “Nothing particular,” said Newman.

“You struck me,” she rejoined, “as a man with a plot in his head. You looked as if you were bent on some sinister errand, and after you had left me I wondered whether I ought to have let you go.”

“I only went over to the other side of the river—to the Carmelites,” said Newman.

Mrs. Tristram looked at him a moment and smiled. “What did you do there? Try to scale the wall?”

“I did nothing. I looked at the place for a few minutes and then came away.”

Mrs. Tristram gave him a sympathetic glance. “You didn’t happen to meet M. de Bellegarde,” she asked, “staring hopelessly at the convent-wall as well? I am told he takes his sister’s conduct very hard.”

“No, I didn’t meet him, I am happy to say,” Newman answered, after a pause.

“They are in the country,” Mrs. Tristram went on; “at—what is the name of the place?—Fleurières. They returned there at the time you left Paris and have been
spending the year in extreme seclusion. The little marquise must enjoy it; I expect to hear that she has eloped with her daughter’s music-master!”

Newman was looking at the light wood-fire; but he listened to this with extreme interest. At last he spoke: “I mean never to mention the name of those people again, and I don’t want to hear anything more about them.” And then he took out his pocketbook and drew forth a scrap of paper. He looked at it an instant, then got up and stood by the fire. “I am going to burn them up,” he said. “I am glad to have you as a witness. There they go!” And he tossed the paper into the flame.

Mrs. Tristram sat with her embroidery-needle suspended. “What is that paper?” she asked.

Newman, leaning against the fireplace, stretched his arms and drew a longer breath than usual. Then after a moment, “I can tell you now,” he said. “It was a paper containing a secret of the Bellegardes—something which would damn them if it were known.”

Mrs. Tristram dropped her embroidery with a reproachful moan. “Ah, why didn’t you show it to me?”

“I thought of showing it to you—I thought of showing it to everyone. I thought of paying my debt to the Bellegardes that way. So I told them, and I frightened them. They have been staying in the country, as you tell me, to keep out of the explosion. But I have given it up.”

Mrs. Tristram began to take slow stitches again. “Have you quite given it up?”

“Oh yes.”

“Is it very bad, this secret?”

“Yes very bad.”

“For myself,” said Mrs. Tristram, “I am sorry you have given it up. I should have liked immensely to see your paper. They have wronged me too, you know, as your sponsor and guarantee, and it would have served for my revenge as well. How did you come into possession of your secret?”

“It’s a long story. But honestly, at any rate”

“And they knew you were master of it?”

“Oh, I told them.”

“Dear me, how interesting!” cried Mrs. Tristram. “And you humbled them at your feet?”

Newman was silent a moment. “No, not at all. They pretended not to care—not to be afraid. But I know they did care—they were afraid.”

“Are you very sure?”

Newman stared a moment. “Yes, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Tristram resumed her slow stitches. “They defied you, eh?”

“Yes,” said Newman, “it was about that.”

“You tried by the threat of exposure to make them retract?” Mrs. Tristram pursued.

“Yes, but they wouldn’t. I gave them their choice, and they chose to take their chance of bluffing off the charge and convicting me of fraud. But they
were
frightened,” Newman added, “and I have had all the vengeance I want.”

“It is most provoking,” said Mrs. Tristram, “to hear you talk of the ‘charge’ when the charge is burnt up. Is it quite consumed?” she asked, glancing at the fire.

Newman assured her that there was nothing left of it.

“Well then,” she said, “I suppose there is no harm in saying that you probably did not make them so very uncomfortable. My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right.”

Newman instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there was nothing left of it.

CHAPTER I

1.
The heart of the picture-galleries in the great French national museum, this room contains, in addition to works by the old masters whom James mentions below, Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa.”

2.
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s “The Immaculate Conception” (c. 1655) depicts “the woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelations 13:1).

3.
Paris and Environs…: Handbook for Travellers
, by Karl Baedeker (Coblenz, 1865)—the “little red guide-book” mentioned above. Asterisks in the Baedeker “are used as marks of commendation.”

4.
A derisive term for the athletic brand of Christian socialism promulgated in England during the 1850s by Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley.

5.
Listed in the Baedeker among “Restaurants of the Highest Class” and located on the Boulevard des Italiens, near Newman’s hotel.

6.
A system of medical treatment that became something of a fad among wealthier Americans in the nineteenth century.

7.
James usually provides an English equivalent for his French phrases, as in, “How much?…
Combien?
” immediately above.
Splendide
, however, implies something much stronger than “very pretty.”

8.
“You
are not offended, are you?”

9.
“Give it to me.”

10.
The price is in fact ten times the going rate. Newman’s phrase, “a good deal,” means, “a lot"—not “a bargain,” as it does in current American slang.

11.
Biscuit
pottery from the town of Sèvres is unglazed—hence
un
finished.

12.
“Of course!”

13.
The root meaning of “invent” is “to come upon.”

14.
In the Christian calendar, the saint upon whose feast day a child is born, who gives the child its name, and who thereafter serves as its tutelary guardian.

15.
Purse.

16.
“Noémie” is the first name of the American heroine in Alexandre Dumas’s play
L’Étrangère
(1875).

17.
Fastidious.

18.
Implies both “advanced” and “high-class.”

19.
Nioche is speaking French here. “Thou art” approximates the familiar form of address—
tu es.

20.
“Don’t argue!”

21.
Intelligence and feeling—“spirit.”

22.
“Too true, alas!”

23.
One certified by a diploma to teach in a government-regulated school.

24.
A man of the world.

25.
Merchant.

26.
Accounting firm.

27.
“Well, then!”

CHAPTER II

1.
Veronese’s painting celebrates the marriage of Eleanor of Austria and William Gonzaga (1561) in a depiction of Christ’s first miracle (John 2:1-11).

2.
A compound of shops, restaurants, and public amusements, lying across the Rue de Rivoli from the Louvre.

3.
This street runs from the Trocadero Gardens to the
Arc de Triomphe, in the modern part of the city then known as the
Colonie Américaine
, the neighborhood of wealthy expatriates.

4.
“That’s still young,” or “A mere youth.”

5.
Breast-feeding in public was then a European, but not an American, custom.

6.
The largest of those listed in Newman’s Baedeker as “Hotels of the Highest Class.”

7.
A promotion conferred on the battlefield, for distinguished service.

8.
That is, daring and imaginative, not just commercial.

9.
A purposely uncomfortable garment worn by monastics to castigate the flesh.

10.
In his
Autobiography
, Benjamin Franklin describes his unpromising arrival in Philadelphia as a poor youth, munching a bread-roll as he passes by the house of his future wife.

11.
“In huge amounts”—not “for the most part.”

12.
When Danaë’s father locked her in a tower, Zeus visited her as a shower of gold.

13.
After seeing his father’s ghost, Hamlet says to his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (act I, scene v).

14.
Natural.

15.
A fictitious organization, probably modeled on the British club then situated on the Boulevard Malsherbes.

16.
La rose
: the cream of the crop.

17.
To Americans of Newman’s day, “Irish” carried the connotation of “shabby gentility.”

18.
At that time, Brooklyn was a village, surrounded by open country.

19.
A self-indulgent lark of the sort to which aristocrats are inclined.

20.
The Parisian equivalent of New York’s Central Park, situated on the Right Bank of the Seine, west of
the Arc de Triomphe, and containing a number of artificial lakes.

21.
Then the most fashionable “watering place” on the Normandy coast.

22.
A colony of wealthy, cosmopolitan Americans on the Rhode Island shore.

CHAPTER III

1.
Appointed by Napoleon III to redesign Paris, Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann superimposed upon the ancient city the system of long boulevards and broad vistas that give it its modern character.

2.
A modish variation on the long gloves that women wore with short-sleeved evening gowns.

3.
At the time, the agitation for women’s suffrage was at its height both in America and in England.

4.
Individual states have always given the American poor some sort of assistance, on the basis of poor laws imported from England by the first colonists.

5.
Heavily.

6.
Loose women.

7.
In Greek legend, Alexander the Great demonstrated his calling to rule Asia by cutting the intricate knot of Gordius, which had defied all previous attempts to untie it.

8.
“Now you’re talking!”

9.
For that particular purpose.

10.
The titular heroes, respectively, of a Byronic narrative poem (1833) by Alfred de Musset and a prose tale (1837) by Théophile Gautier, two major figures of the French Romantic movement.

11.
This line, sometimes appended to help-wanted notices in American cities after the great midcentury influx of Irish immigrants, became a catch phrase for xenophobia in general.

12.
The proud, light-skinned Circassians of the Caucasus, who became famous during the nineteenth century
for their valiant struggle against Russian domination, often sold their daughters into concubinage in the harems of Turkey. See Byron’s
Don Juan
(canto IV, stanzas 113-14).

13.
A sybaritic monarch of ancient Assyria, whose melodramatic suicide with his concubines is the subject of a painting by Eugène Delacroix that James had seen in Paris.

14.
A mansion or town house on one of the principal streets of the Faubourg St. Germain, the neighborhood of the old French nobility in Paris.

15.
Social class.

16.
The ancient, feudal nobility.

17.
The Legitimists continued to support the divine right of the Bourbon monarchy after the deposition of Charles X in 1830. The Ultramontanists asserted the supremacy of the pope over all national governments in the affairs of the Roman Catholic church. Together, these two parties constituted the far-right wing of nineteenth-century French politics.

18.
Each generation of a titled family would redesign its coat of arms to indicate the alliance of noble bloodlines in marriage. Fifty such “quarterings” would seem to denote a thousand-year pedigree, although the practice of quartering did not start until the twelfth century, under Eleanor of Aquitaine.