The American (58 page)

8.
James may have been thinking of Offenbach’s
Pomme d’Api
(“Lady-Apple”), which was, however, not produced until 1873, five years after Newman’s visit.

9.
Gioacchino
Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpie” (1817), a frothy one-act opera in which a peasant girl must fight off the advances of an old lecher while pursuing her true love.

CHAPTER XIV

1.
“Yes, mother.”

2.
“Well, come in, gentlemen!”

3.
In 1870, New York had about one million inhabitants; while Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Chicago were roughly equal in size, with about 300,000 each. Newman pointedly omits the old Eastern cities, however; and when James wrote the novel, Chicago was still recovering from the great fire of 1871.

4.
By 1868, the once beautiful soprano voice of Erminia Frezzolini had so deteriorated that she could no longer attract audiences anywhere except in America.

5.
A rustic festival—in this case, a pagan orgy centering on Hermes, the Greek god of fertility.

6.
Party.

CHAPTER XV

1.
A street on the Right Bank, between the Palais Royal and the Champs Élysées, in a recently commercialized section of the ancient city.

2.
A Parisian newspaper, mainly social and literary rather than political.

3.
After being washed, kid gloves were blown up, tied at the wrist, and hung on a line to dry.

4.
“Waiter.”

5.
“How awful!”

6.
Approximately $ 1200—a perfectly respectable middle-class income at the time, but only about half as much per day as the cost of Newman’s hotel room.

7.
Deferentially attentive to a woman, as a chivalrous knight should be.

8.
“Good-bye.”

9.
Windowed.

10.
The highest elevation in Paris (about 400 feet above the Seine)—mainly a working-class district.

11.
Impudent girl.

12.
The glass harmonica, an extremely popular instrument of the day, played by applying moistened fingers to the rims of rotating crystal bowls.

13.
A carved gem.

14.
A kind of artistic charade in which hired actors or guests imitated famous paintings and sculptures.

15.
Swindle.

16.
The customary focal point of popular celebrations in America.

17.
Disreputable woman.

18.
All in all.

19.
Guarantee.

20.
Witticisms.

CHAPTER XVI

1.
An artificial clockwork doll.

2.
“Wretch!”

3.
French custom forbade wedding attire of red, blue, green, or yellow. Green bows were also the badge of prostitutes.

4.
At his disposal.

5.
The Bonapartists.

6.
This would seem to be a misprint for “hand” (Bellegarde makes a similar gesture elsewhere). “Hat,” however, appears in all printed versions of the novel, and James added the adjective “flattened” in the New York Edition. Why the host is carrying his hat in his own house remains a puzzle.

7.
Great names.

8.
“That’s a fact.”

9.
“Tell me.”

10.
Reputed personal history, as of a saint or a hero.

11.
Outlandish.

12.
A wild-animal trainer.

13.
In the fairy tale, a merchant’s daughter redeems an aristocratic monster by learning to love him.

14.
Lengthened his mine shaft.

15.
Pointed at.

16.
“The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy”—in which a knight-errant is enthralled and left forlorn by a lovely enchantress.

17.
For his benefit.

18.
Coffee poured over crushed ice.

19.
The ground floor, made up mainly of informal rooms. The reception rooms are on the
premier étage
, one flight above.

CHAPTER XVII

1.
Mozart’s serio-comic rendition (1787) of the story of Don Juan, the legendary Spanish libertine and blasphemer.

2.
Seat on the main floor, in front of the orchestra pit.

3.
Private stagecoaches, drawn by four horses.

4.
Grooming himself.

5.
Marietta Alboni, a famous Italian contralto of the time.

6.
Intermissions.

7.
A decidedly informal style.

8.
Literally “bathing tub”: a box on the ground floor, near the pit.

9.
Lobby.

10.
Seriously.

11.
A deep red gem with a hard, smooth surface.

12.
“You speak wisely.”

13.
Steps down from one’s social station.

14.
A piece of fiction appearing serially in this newspaper.

15.
A noblewoman whom the Don has jilted and who helps to engineer his downfall. Her music is a mixture
of lamentation and resentful anger, but always highly dignified.

16.
The Don precipitates his own doom when he tries to seduce this peasant girl on the eve of her wedding.

17.
In the final scenes of the opera, the statue of Don Pedro (Commander of Seville, whom the Don has killed in a duel after insulting his daughter) comes to life under the Don’s taunts and transports the rake to Hell.

18.
The site of the Bellegardes’ country estate, Fleurières.

19.
The ancient district of learned societies on the Left Bank; also called l’Université.

20.
Quaintly amusing.

21.
The legal agreement drawn up at the time of her marriage, setting forth the rights and responsibilities of husband and wife.

22.
Idée fixe
: an obsession.

23.
Dancing the
can-can.

24.
A person of delicate tastes and habits.

25.
Shined shoes.

26.
The sites, respectively, of Valentin’s apartment, his home, and the Opéra.

27.
The legend, told by the earliest New World explorers, of an Indian chieftain who annually covered himself in molten gold and threw himself in a lake.

28.
Woman usher.

29.
A quarrelsome person.

30.
“That’s the sort of thing that establishes a woman!”

31.
“Hell.”

32.
An industrial city in northeastern France.

33.
In 1867, a newspaper humorist professed to have discovered the source of this proverb in an old English ballad, “Jolly Roger Roughead.” The attribution, however, eventually proved a hoax.

34.
Suitcase.

35.
Squandering the resources.

36.
“What would you expert?”

37.
A complaint not about the quality of prose writing, but about the usurpation of ancient romance by cold scientific fact.

38.
An ornamental design placed at the end of a chapter in a printed book.

CHAPTER XVIII

1.
Unrealized.

2.
The ancient city walls.
Cintré
also means “girdled.”

3.
A wealthy residential district adjoining the Bois de Boulogne.

4.
This terraced and landscaped embankment of the Seine, south of the Arc de Triomphe, was actually more “fantastic” in 1876, when James wrote these words, than in 1868, having been much improved in the meantime.

5.
Burke’s Peerage
, the official genealogy of noble families in Great Britain.

CHAPTER XIX

1.
Mountains on the French-Swiss border.

2.
Parish priest.

3.
Amenable to compromise.

4.
District.

5.
Report of evidence.

6.
Dressing room

7.
Maid.

8.
Valentin’s military unit during the Papal Wars.

9.
“Swiss Cross”—the name of the inn.

10.
“He’s more than an Englishman—he’s an Anglomaniac!”

11.
“For heaven’s sake!”

12.
Backless wooden shoes.

13
A scandalous novel of manners by Choderlos de Laclos (1782).

14.
The concluding words of this proverb are “…we die.”

15.
Closet, study.

16.
Ça va
!: “All right!”

17.
A great Jewish family of European bankers, who started out as poor commoners and were made barons in the eighteenth century by Francis I of Austria.

18.
Valentin is not pleased, of course. He is merely saying,
Bon
!: “I thought so!”

19.
“There (I have said it)!”

20.
The communion chalice.

CHAPTER XX

1.
Small town.

2.
Henry of Navarre, the first Bourbon king of France (1589-1610), whose wedding is the subject of the Rubens painting that Newman sees in
Chapter IV
.

3.
Servants.

4.
That is, “like a tourist with a guide-book and
with
a cicerone….” The footman is the “cicerone.”

5.
Instruments of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition.

CHAPTER XXI

1.
The English defeated the French at Poitiers in 1356, during the Hundred Years War.

2.
Construction.

3.
A light four-wheeled carriage.

4.
In a well, that is.

5.
“Sister Catherine”—an allusion to St. Catherine of Alexandria, the first “nun” and the subject of the Correggio painting that Newman sees in
Chapter IV
.

6.
“The scoundrel!”

7.
Parlor.

8.
“The (heraldic) Arms of France”—the name of the inn.

9.
Very Whiggish and anti-papistical—as opposed to “High Church,” which is Tory, Anglo-Catholic.

CHAPTER XXII

1.
For her title, that is.

2.
“My father.”

3.
Dispensing physician.

4.
A mirror, used to detect the last almost imperceptible respirations of a dying person.

CHAPTER XXIII

1.
Easy chairs.

2.
That is, “…
compared
to them.”

3.
Chambermaid.

4.
A street off the Boulevard Haussmann, near Newman’s apartment on the Right Bank.

5.
“Street of Hell.” The street is fictitious, although there is a Passage d’Enfer, off the Boulevard Raspail, across from the Montparnasse Cemetery on the Left Bank. In Thomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
(1833), the spiritual crisis of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh occurs on the Rue Saint-Thomas de l’Enfer, which is also fictitious.

CHAPTER XXIV

1.
Habit.

2.
A compassionate nature.

3.
“After that, you’re on your own.”

4.
Englishwoman.

5.
The date.

6.
Fray.

7.
“Just a minute.”

8.
“My poor dear.”

9.
“There would still be something (fishy).”

CHAPTER XXV

1.
James appears to have forgotten that the novels of George Sand were not reissued in this distinctive binding until the early 1870s, several years after Newman’s visit to Paris.

2.
French expression.

3.
Under cover, not out in the open.

4.
Perfectly charming.

5.
Another allusion to the military and political contest between Victor Emmanuel, who had come from Sardinia
and was now King of Italy, and the pope, in whose army Valentin had served.

6.
Histoire de coeur
or
histoire intérieure
: a chronicle of their moral affections, as opposed to their public actions.

7.
Idle pleasantries.

8.
A personification of the heartless libertine, from Cervantes’s
Don Quixote.

9.
A stone monument in this Parisian square.

10.
A black mourning-band worn by men.

11.
A port of embarcation on the English Channel.

12.
A public park in London.

13.
Liveried footmen.

14.
All common tourist attractions in England

15.
“Well, well!”

CHAPTER XXVI

1.
There is, in fact, no St. Veronica in the Calendar of Saints. “Veronica” is the name of the veil used to wipe Christ’s face on his way to Calvary and subsequently preserved as a relic in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

2.
In the immediate vicinity lie the Catacombs of the Place d’Enfer (now the Place Denfert-Rochereau), the Hôpital Broca, the Prison de la Santé, and the Convent de la Visitation.

3.
The cathedral stands on an island between the Left Bank and the Right Bank.