The American (57 page)

19.
Composure.

20.
Turkish harems.

21.
A literal translation of the portress’s word
visible
: “prepared to receive visitors.”

CHAPTER IV

1.
A loose shirt worn by peasants and workmen and affected by artists—a smock.

2.
Delicacy of execution.

3.
The Boulevard des Capucines, in front of the Grand Hotel.

4
Peculiarities
of the working-class dialect spoken in the East End of London, where Nioche’s countinghouse was presumably located.

5.
Gold coins of the Second Empire, stamped with the likeness of Napoleon III.

6.
N’a pas le sou
: is penniless, unable to offer a dowry.

7.
Ne voient pas du měme oeil
: they don’t see it that way.

8.
Espèces
: coin.

9.
Opération
means both a process and a commercial transaction.

10.
“Let’s see!”

11.
“My day”—as in,
Mes beaux jours sont passé
: “I’ve had my day.”

12.
A small cup of strong black coffee, taken after dinner.

13.
Peruse.

14.
Pork butcher.

15.
A street in a working-class district in northern Paris.

16.
Alphonse Lamartine, another major French Romantic writer, whose lyrics James had heard beautifully read by members of the Théâtre Français in January of 1876.

17.
Also called the Comédie Française, it adjoins the Palais Royal. Its actors were famous for their perfect diction.

18.
Unabashed flirt.

19.
Impulsive act

20.
Neighborhood.

21.
Lady’s companion—a quasi servant hired to reside and travel with a solitary older woman

22.
“Nonsense!”

23.
Decorous, proper.

24.
Most likely, Correggio’s “Betrothal of St. Catherine of Alexandria,” which depicts Catherine’s dedication of her virginity to Christ (the prototype of the vow taken
by nuns) and, in the background, the martyrdom of St. Stephen.

25.
Probably, Veronese’s “Portrait of a Venetian Lady,” which hangs in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre and fits the description below.

26.
Copyists in the Louvre were required to alter the scale of the original, to prevent forgeries.

27.
In princely fashion.

28.
“I confess it freely!”

29.
This painting hangs in the Rubens gallery and depicts the wedding festival of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France (1600) as a marriage of Juno and Jupiter.

30.
Corset stays.

31.
Dowry.

32.
Waiters.

CHAPTER V

1.
The Virgin Mary, as she is conventionally portrayed in religious painting.

2.
The United States became world famous in the nineteenth century for the rapid development of what is called “traction”—the technology of surface transportation.

3.
Following a visit to Belgium in 1874, James remarked on the beautiful Hôtel de Ville and its lovely Gothic belfry.

4.
A guide for sighcseers.

5.
Lamoral, Count of Egmont, and Count Horn (or Hoorn), executed in 1568 for resisting the Spanish Inquisition in The Netherlands, are portrayed as proto-American patriots in
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
(1856), by John Lothrop Motley, an acquaintance of James’s.

6.
The broad segment of this avenue that runs from the Place de la Concorde to the Rond Point was lined on both sides with restaurants, theatres, museums, galleries, and gardens.

7.
The
Continental itinerary that capped off the education of English gentlemen.

8.
Couriers.

9.
Boston.

10.
What we would call family-style, with a fixed menu, served at a fixed price, often at a common table.

11.
Newman’s Baedeker locates several of these purveyors of American goods near the Grand Hotel.

12.
In the days before photographic journalism, some of the more popular New York papers—most notably
Harper’s Weekly
and
Leslie’s Weekly
—illustrated their lead stories with halftone blocks.

13.
Anna Brownell Jameson’s series of books called
Sacred and Legendary Art
(1848-60) were much admired at the time for their piously enthusiastic treatment of the relations between Christian art and history.

14.
In
Wilhelm Meister
, which James read in the translation by Thomas Carlyle.

15.
An Alpine pass between Brig, in Switzerland, and Iselle, in Italy.

16.
The paintings of Bernardino Luini, exhibited in several Milanese museums, are especially noted for their sweetly pleasurable treatment of religious subjects.

17.
“Eating whets the appetite.”

18.
Hitched to the carriage.

19.
L’art pour l’art
(“Art for art’s sake”): the slogan of the aesthetic party in the late-Victorian debate between “French” aesthetes and “British” moralists concerning the proper object of art.

CHAPTER VI

1.
One of the new boulevards built during the modernization of Paris by Baron Haussmann. It extends from the Boulevard des Italiens west, behind the Opéra, toward the Arc de Triomphe.

2.
An especially rich and important church on the Left Bank, dating back to the reign of Louis XIV.

3.
St.
Sulpice lies about eight blocks from Claire’s home on the Rue de l’Université.

4.
A sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

5.
“My mother.”

6.
A plutocrat, whose status and power stem from the disposal of capital, rather than from the ownership of land, as would a duke’s.

7.
Tristram is alluding to Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), a Gothic novel in which a fair Anglo-Saxon maid is victimized by an Italian aristocrat.

8.
This phrase, with its allusion to the Great Seal of the United States, was often employed in Newman’s day to characterize American braggadocio in general and the grandiloquence of Independence Day orations in particular.

9.
The date falls in the reign of Louis XIII, under the ministry of Cardinal Richelieu, and marks the year of the English invasion of France by the Duke of Buckingham, during the Catholic suppression of Protestant uprisings.

10.
“Out into the word”—a opposed to remaining “in the family.”

CHAPTER VII

1.
The word “race” is used here in its nineteenth-century sense to denote a linguistic or cultural community, not in its modern anthropological sense. The “races” in question are Anglo-Saxon and Gallic (or, more broadly, Latin).

2.
“Ill.”

3.
Not a leaf in a novel, but a young attendant upon a knight in a chivalric tale.

4.
Haughtiness.

5.
A man of gentle birth—not merely one with correct manners.

6.
The imperial line descended from Napoleon I, represented in Newman’s day by Napoleon III.

7.
A
commoner.

8.
“On our side of the ship.”

9.
The struggles for Italian unification in the 1850s were resisted by the pope, who recruited Ultramontanists to fight for the preservation of the church’s secular powers. The papal forces were defeated by Victor Emmanuel’s Piedmontese at Castelfidardo on September 18, 1860, whereupon they retired to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which served as the pope’s fortified refuge until 1870. Valentin’s wound is “apostolic” in that the pope is bishop of the Apostolic See, the See of Rome. The days of Caligula (A.D. 37-41) were a period of tyrannical persecution.

10.
As used here, the word denotes a transcendent ideal of nobility and an attendant code of ritual etiquette.

11.
The Rue d’Anjou lies in the same general
quartier
as Newman’s apartment but on the ancient, rather than the modern, map of Paris.

12.
“Nevertheless.”

13.
A seller of
libretti
in translation for foreign audiences at the Théâtre Français.

14.
A bruise.

15.
Rooming house.

CHAPTER VIII

1.
In Greek mythology, the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Models of sibling closeness, they avenged their mother’s murder of their father by killing her.

2.
Great lady.

3.
In Greek mythology, Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, fell in love with the statue of a beautiful woman, thereby brought her to life, and married her. In one version of the story, Pygmalion himself is the sculptor.

4.
“Good Lord, yes!”

5.
Prescription.

6.
Newman means “agreeable”; Valentin means “fastidious.”

7.
The
middle class.

8.
A legendary African king whose misogyny was cured when he fell in love with a beautiful pauper.

9.
The petty nobility, beneath the peerage or
haute noblesse.

10.
“Whew!”

11.
“You impress me.”

12.
“Put it there!”

13.
The minority party in the French Assembly.

CHAPTER IX

1.
Artless, unaffected.

CHAPTER X

1.
Inquisitive.

2.
Abonder de le mime sens
: in complete agreement with her.

3.
In the same speech, lago calls Othello “an erring barbarian” and bemoans the “frail vow” that holds this mismatched couple together (act I, scene iii).

4.
Lots of character.

5.
A common generic term for oriental carpets, especially the distinctive red Bokharas from Turkestan.

6.
This is the older Marquise’s maiden name.

7.
A popular English magazine of fashion during the 1830s.

8.
An old-fashioned, high starched collar.

9.
Since James changed “person” to “lady” in the New York Edition, he may have been thinking of the word
belle-dame
, which means both “beautiful lady” and “prostitute.” Another word for “prostitute” is
coureuse
, which also means “gadabout.”

10.
My brother.

11.
That is, in temporary apartments or hotel rooms, as opposed to permanent domiciles.

12.
In Newman’s day, the site of the French royal palace.

13.
The punctuation given here follows the 1877
edition. In 1879, “Nevertheless” was enclosed in quotation marks; and in 1883, a comma was inserted after the word. Although James retained these two changes for the New York Edition, only the 1877 version seems to make sense.

14.
“That’s news!”

15.
At the time, the franc was worth about twenty cents.

CHAPTER XI

1.
The Grande Galerie, which extends from the Salon Carré to the Salle Van Dyck.

2.
Worries, anxieties.

3.
The Salle des Primitifs Italiens.

4.
A European would not necessarily introduce two persons simply because they were face to face—especially if they were of different social classes.

5.
“My goodness!”

6.
His
ennuis.

7.
The Escalier Daru, which connects the Salon des Primitifs Italiens to the Grande Galerie.

8.
Literally “The Devil!”—an expression, here, of wondering dismay.

9.
“See here!”

10.
Some bad luck.

11.
In the
Roman de la Rose
, Virginius kills his daughter to preserve her virtue.

12.
In the 1879 edition, the three preceding paragraphs are printed as one, obscuring the change of speakers. See “A Note on the Text.”

CHAPTER XII

1.
Jacopo Sansovino (1486?-1570), designer of some of Venice’s finest buildings, in the classic style, as well as several enormous allegorical sculptures.

2.
The legislative body of the French government.

3.
Private sitting room.

4.
The last decade of the Bourbon monarchy.

5.
“That’s
a wise decision.”

6.
Vous me devez un cierge fameux
: “You have reason to be grateful to me.”

7.
“Red heel”: a member of the royal court.

8.
“Old rock”: of the old order.

9.
“So much for family pride!”

10.
The Napoleonic Empire, which supplanted the Bourbon monarchy.

11.
In 1778, Benjamin Franklin persuaded France to assist the American revolutionaries in their war with Britain.

12.
Jeta son bonnet par-dessus les moulins
: struck out on her own unretraceable course.

13.
Perseus, the offspring produced by Zeus’s golden visitation of Danaë, freed the Princess Andromeda from a sea monster and married her.

CHAPTER XIII

1.
Henri Charles, Comte de Chambord, the last Bourbon pretender to the throne, whom the Legitimists called Henry V, although he would die in 1883 without ever having ruled.

2.
A lady’s personal maid.

3.
A right of ownership that returns to the original holder after having been deeded out for a period of time.

4.
Door curtain.

5.
A clamp used to keep the subject’s head from moving during the exposure of photographic plates in old, slow portrait cameras. Newspaper cartoons of the day used it as a stock emblem in caricatures of pompous dignitaries.

6.
Resemblance to an animal, rather than cruelty.

7.
Jacques Offenbach, a composer of enormously popular musical comedies, noted for their unrefined gaiety.