References to Baedeker are to Paris and its Environs, 6th edn. (Leipsig, 1878). Shakespearian references are to the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974). References to the early version of the novel are to the first English edition of 1879 by Macmillan.
Thackeray’s ‘Denis Duval’ . . . Mrs Gaskell’s ‘Wives and Daughters’ . . . Stevenson’s ‘Weir of Hermiston’: all unfinished at the time of their authors’ deaths (Thackeray in 1863, Mrs Gaskell in 1865, and Stevenson—a good friend of James’s—in 1894).
Gray’s beautiful Ode: James is thinking of these lines from Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (1748):
Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today: . . .
Etretat: James described his summer break at this resort on the Normandy coast in ‘A French Watering Place’ for the New York Tribune, 26 August 1876 (reprinted in Parisian Sketches, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind, (London, 1958) ). He used it as the setting for a critical phase of his novel Confidence (1879), chs. 19–21 (see Introduction, n. 5).
Bayonne: half-an-hour’s drive from Biarritz, near the Spanish border, James told his father, ‘the prettiest little town in France; extremely picturesque, half Spanish in character’ (Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. ii (London, 1975) ). He spent a week here before returning to Paris in mid-September 1876.
Saint-Germain-en-Laye: James retreated to the Pavillon Louis XIV in this quiet town a short train-ride west of Paris. James had used it—including the famous view from its ‘terrace’—as the setting for one of his finest early tales, ‘Mme. De Mauves’ (1874).
Le Père Goriot’: Honoré de Balzac’s masterpiece of 1834, much admired by James.
Robert Louis Stevenson . . . in an admirable passage: James probably has in mind the ‘Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace a Career of Art’, first published in Scribner’s Magazine (September 1888), and reprinted in Across the Plains (1892).
Zola: in one of his letters for the New York Tribune (13 May 1876) James had described Émile Zola (1840–1902), whom he had met in Flaubert’s circle, as ‘the most thorough-going of the little band of out-and-out realists’ (Parisian Sketches). He delivered his mature judgement on Zola’s achievement in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly, August 1903 (reprinted in Notes on Novelists, 1914).
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: title-character of the 1857 novel by Gustave Flaubert, about whom and which—character, author, and novel—James had mixed and unresolved feelings. He wrote on Flaubert in 1874, 1876, 1893, and 1902 (see Literary Criticism, vol. ii, in Select Bibliography).
the thread of which . . . is not once exchanged . . . for any other thread: in an important letter to Mrs Humphry Ward of 26 July 1899, James spoke of the technical variety displayed by his novels so far, as regards the possibility of ‘going behind’ the consciousness of his characters: ‘I “go behind” right and left in “The Princess Casamassima”, “The Bostonians”, “The Tragic Muse”, just as I do it but singly in “The American” and “Maisie”, and just as I do it consistently never at all . . . in “The Awkward Age”.’ (Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. iv (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).)
the year 1868: James sets his novel in what would turn out to be the last years of the Second Empire, on the brink of the Franco-Prussian war (1870) and the Paris Commune (1871).
Salon Carré: this contained ‘the gems of the collection’, according to Baedeker (see below).
Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna: Baedeker described the Immaculate Conception by the Spanish Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82) as ‘pervaded with an intense sentiment of religious enthusiasm’. The Madonna is ‘moon-borne’ after the description in Revelation 12 : 1, of ‘a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’.
Bädeker: Karl Baedeker’s first Handbook for Paris and Its Environs was published in 1865, and thereafter regularly updated. Asterisks signalled ‘marks of commendation’ (the Murillo got two).
muscular Christian: devotee of the ethos of physical heartiness associated with the Christian socialism of Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley from the 1850s onwards. Edwin Sill Fussell points out an irony here: Kingsley was the vociferous antagonist of the man with whom Newman shares his name, ‘the most famous Anglo-American Roman Catholic convert of the modern world’, John Henry Newman (The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge, 1993)).
Café Anglais: one of the expensive restaurants on the Boulevard des Italiens.
Sèvres biscuit: unglazed pottery from the town of Sèvres near Versailles.
Noémie Nioche: ‘Noémie’ is the first name of the American heroine of L’Étrangère, a play by Dumas fils which opened in 1876 starring Sarah Bernhardt. James wrote a scathing review for the New York Tribune, 25 March 1876 (reprinted in Parisian Sketches). For its possible influence on this novel see Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1961). Along with ‘Nioche’, Noémie’s name makes her sound more homey than she would wish, ‘nioche’ rhyming with brioche (‘bread-roll’) and mioche (‘kid’).
Paul Veronese . . . the marriage-feast of Cana of Galilee: Paolo Veronese (c. 1528–88) completed his painting of Christ’s first miracle (see John 2: 1–11) in 1562. It took up nearly the whole of the south wall of the Salon Carré; ‘a perfect “symphony of colours”’, Baedeker rhapsodized, awarding it another double asterisk.
Palais Royal: Baedeker warned readers about the ‘tempting display of jewellery, and other “objets de luxe”’, in the ground-floor shops in the square across the Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Louvre: ‘These were once the best shops in Paris, but they are now greatly surpassed by those in the Boulevards and elsewhere.’
Avenue d’Iéna: one of the twelve avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, and the heart of the area known as the Colonie Américaine.
Grand Hotel: one of the three largest hotels in Paris, on the Boulevard des Capucines, ‘managed somewhat in the same style as the large American hotels, and . . . replete with every comfort’ (Baedeker).
brevet: rank.
Dr Franklin . . . munching a penny loaf: Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–90) humble entrance into Philadelphia, as described in his unfinished Autobiography.
the golden stream: a reference to the shower of gold into which Zeus famously transformed himself to reach Danaë in the tower where her father had locked her.
more . . . than his philosophy had hitherto dreamt of: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, | Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, says Hamlet, after seeing his father’s ghost (Hamlet, I. v. 166–7). See note to p. 361 for a further allusion to Hamlet, added in revision.
half a million: $500,000 in 1907 would have been worth just over £100,000, figures which would need to be multiplied by a factor of nine or ten to get their modern-day equivalent. In the 1879 text the figure had been a mere $60,000.
into the country: as Brooklyn in 1868 would still have been.
Bois de Boulogne: converted after 1852 into an elegant public park (though about to be ravaged by the sieges of 1870–1).
Trouville: fashionable resort on the Normandy coast.
Newport: resort on Rhode Island.
broad avenues distributed by Baron Haussmann: Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), responsible for the modernization of Paris under the Second Empire (1852–70), in the course of which, as Baedeker reported, ‘Dense masses of houses and numbers of tortuous streets were replaced by broad boulevards, spacious squares, and palatial edifices.’
furbelows: showy ornaments, flounces, or trimming in a lady’s dress.
the iridescence of decay: a 1907 addition which draws on a typically ‘decadent’ line of the previous decade, from Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s ‘Baudelaire’ (1894), ‘The gorgeous iridescence of decay’.
as the French proverb puts it: James cites it in French, in a letter of 28 May 1876, apologizing to his friend and editor W. D. Howells for his lack of news—‘“La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a.”’ (Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. ii (London, 1975).)
the heroes of the French romantic poets, Rolla and Fortunio: Rolla was the eponymous hero of an 1833 poem by Alfred de Musset, and Fortunio of an 1837 tale by Théophile Gautier.
Circassian with a dagger in her baggy trousers: fair-skinned Circassian slaves on their way to Turkish harems caught the eye of nineteenth-century writers and painters from Byron onwards, in whose Don Juan ‘Circassians’ is rhymed with ‘passions’ (Canto IV, stanza 113).
Sardanapalus: Assyrian tyrant and voluptuary whose spectacular suicide was made famous by the poetic drama of Byron’s named after him (1821), and the painting by Eugène Delacroix (1827), inspired by Byron, the earlier version of which James saw in Paris in 1876.
the very top of the basket: a literal translation of the common French phrase le dessus du panier, for which the equivalent English would be ‘out of the top drawer’.
Rue de l’Université: one of the main streets in the aristocratic Faubourg St Germain, on the Left Bank. Baedeker warned tourists that ‘the quarter presents a dull and deserted appearance especially on Sundays and holidays’.
Claire de Bellegarde: her first name associates her with light; later references will qualify this to suggest clair de lune or ‘moonlight’. ‘Bellegarde’ tells us that she is ‘well-guarded’.
a Legitimist or an Ultramontane: on the far right wing of French politics of the time, the Legitimists supported the claims of the Bourbons overthrown in 1830, and specifically the claim to the throne of Henry Charles Ferdinand (1820–83) (see note to p. 176), while the Ultramontanists looked ‘beyond the mountains’ to the power of the papacy in all temporal as well as spiritual affairs.
Madame de Cintré: the name primarily suggests encirclement and constriction, as in the English ‘cincture’ and ‘cinct’ from the same Latin root, but it also has the architectural sense of ‘vaulted’ or ‘arched’ (of a door, window, or roof ), and heraldic associations with royalty. The ending in ‘é’ gives it an appropriately aristocratic ring, far removed from ‘Nioche’, for example.
major-domo: ‘Butler’ (as indeed it was in 1879).
napoleons: gold coins of the Second Empire named after Napoleon III.
specie: cash.
Rue de Clichy: a street in a working-class district of northern Paris.
Lamartine: Alphonse Lamartine (1790–1869), one of the major French Romantic poets.
Comédie: the Comédie Française or Théâtre Français, situated on the south-west side of the Palais-Royal, much admired by James for the high style of its acting and diction.
a Marriage of Saint Catherine: the Betrothal of St Catherine, painted by Antonio Correggio (1489–1534) in 1526–7, depicting Catherine’s self-dedication to Christ.
Italian portrait of a lady: portrait known as the Bella Nani, painted by Veronese in 1555.
Rubenses—the Marriage of Marie de Médicis: celebration of the wedding in 1610 between Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France, painted by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).
‘What sort of a husband can you get for twelve thousand francs?’: adapted from an anecdote cited by James in one of his letters to the New York Tribune (19 February 1876), about the maidservant who was asked why she had spent the thirty crowns she had saved on marriage to a hunchback: ‘What sort of a husband can one get for thirty crowns?’ (Parisian Sketches).
cicerone: tourist guide.
Counts Egmont and Horn: Dutch patriots executed in 1568 for their leading role in the resistance to Philip of Spain.
Babcock . . . a young Unitarian minister: William James wrote to his brother: ‘Your second instalment of the American is prime. The morbid little clergyman is worthy of Ivan Sergeitch [i.e. Turgenev]. I was not a little amused to find some of my own attributes in him.—I think you found my “moral reaction” excessive when I was abroad’ (The Correspondence of William James, vol. i, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville, Va., 1992) ). For an account of the brothers in Italy together in 1873–4, see Leon Edel, The Conquest of London (London, 1962) 146–56.
Graham bread and hominy: Babcock is a devotee of the vegetarian principles advocated by Sylvester Graham (1794–1851); ‘hominy’ is maize or corn boiled with water or milk.
the table d’hôte system: fixed-price set menu.
Mrs Jameson’s volumes: the once popular Sacred and Legendary Art (1848–60) by Anna Brownell Jameson (1794–1860)—now best known for her Shakespeare’s Heroines —would have provided poor Babcock with some of the guidance for which he is looking.
Goethe recommended: in Wilhelm Meister, translated by Thomas Carlyle (1824, 1827).
Simplon: alpine pass between Switzerland and Italy.
Luini: Bernardino Luini (c.1485–1532) commended himself to the Victorians, especially Ruskin, for his sentimental treatment of religious subjects.
Baden-Baden: German spa-resort, setting for the opening scene of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which James was reading at the time of first writing in 1876, and used by James himself for a large part of Confidence (1879), chs. 3–15.
Trebizond, Samarcand, Bokhara: more exotic-sounding than the ‘Medina and Mecca’ of 1879 which they here replace.
the joy of life: a phrase of the 1890s and after, derived from William Archer’s translation of Ibsen’s livsglæde (the whole sentence being a 1907 revision); cf. Appendix 1, p. 366.
Boulevard Haussmann: running east–west from the Arc de Triomphe in continuation with the Avenue de Friedland, named after the architect of modern Paris (see note to p. 39), and pronounced ‘handsome’ by Baedeker. Edwin Sill Fussell suggests (The French Side of Henry James (New York, 1990) ) that the thick gilt of Newman’s apartment may have been inspired by the new Opéra, which James described to readers of the New York Tribune as ‘nothing but gold—gold upon gold: it has been gilded till it is dark with gold’ (Parisian Sketches).
church of Saint Sulpice: the ‘richest and one of the most important of the churches on the left bank of the Seine’ (Baedeker).
The Morals of Murray Hill!: a district on New York’s Middle East Side below Grand Central Station, from 27th St on the south to 42nd St on the north, and from 6th Ave. east to 3rd Ave. (excluding 5th Ave.). It became an exclusive residential area in the post-Civil War period from 1870 onwards, attracting such wealthy families as the Belmonts, Rhinelanders, Tiffanys, and Havemeyers. (In 1879 Tristram exclaimed—‘The Mysteries of the Fifth Avenue!’)
Louis-Quinze period: Louis XV reigned 1715–74. (In 1879, ‘the familiar rococo style of the last century’.)
1627: John Carlos Rowe writes: ‘At the very least, Newman ought to make some connection between this date and the early years of the Puritan Bay Colony, but even more important than this American connection are the historical events of the war waged between 1624 and 1629 by Cardinal Richelieu against the Huguenots. Richelieu attempted to exterminate the Huguenots not simply as the major Protestant opposition to Catholicism in seventeenth-century France but also as the religious basis for republican sympathies opposed to the monarchy.’ (‘The Politics of Innocence’, in Martha Banta (ed.), New Essays on The American (Cambridge, 1987). ) In 1627 France was invaded by English forces under the Duke of Buckingham.
the Bonapartes: descended from Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor in 1868—nearing the end of his time—was Napoleon III.
fight for the Pope: Valentin has fought with the French troops sent by Napoleon III to support Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–78) in his struggles against the Italian republicans.
Castelfidardo: on 18 September 1860 the papal forces were defeated by the Piedmontese at this small village on the Adriatic coast.
Heliogabalus: profligate Roman Emperor ad 218–22 (replacing the ‘Caligula’ of 1879).
castle of Saint Angelo: refuge of the Pope and his troops after the defeat at Castelfidardo until 1870.
the Rue d’Anjou Saint Honoré: short street running north–south from Boulevard Haussmann to the Rue du Faubourg St Honoré.
Madame Dandelard: not a dignified name, the first part might suggest dandiner, ‘to waddle’, and the second, lard, ‘bacon’ (or phonetically, dent de lard, ‘bacon-tooth’).
Orestes and Electra: the brother and sister who together avenged their father Agamemnon by killing his murderers, their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus: an oddly disturbing allusion in its relation to the Bellegardes’ family history, as it is eventually revealed.
between two fires: a literal translation of the French phrase entre deux feux, for which an English equivalent would be ‘between the frying pan and the fire’.
King Cophetua: legendary King of Africa who fell in love with a beggar maid—the subject of a well-known painting by Edward Burne-Jones (1884).
Samson . . . pulled down the temple: as represented in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671).
your quarterings: in heraldry, the division of a shield into quarters to produce a ‘coat of arms’.
abounding in her own sense: a literal translation of the French phrase meaning ‘to be in complete agreement’ (abonder dans votre sens).
‘a supersubtle Venetian’: it is Iago who tries to sow the seeds of doubt in Othello’s mind by so crediting or discrediting Desdemona (1. iii. 156). ‘Supersubtle’ is an epithet James became fond of applying to some of his own leading characters. For a further telling reference to Othello, see note to p. 356.
Lady Emmeline Atheling: the maiden name of the old Marquise connotes the dim and distant past, ‘atheling’ being derived from Old English to mean ‘member of a noble family’.
Books of Beauty: fashion magazines of the 1830s.
the Tuileries: the public gardens of the Tuileries Palace (destroyed by the Communards in 1871). Baedeker described the sunny and sheltered west side as ‘the paradise of nurse-maids and children, elderly persons, and invalids’.
the long hall of the Italian masters: the Grande Galerie.
tulle: fine silk net used for dresses, veils, and hats.
smaller apartment . . . on the left: known then as the ‘Galerie des Sept Mètres’, now the ‘Salle des Primitifs Italiens’.
expray, expray: Newman’s version of ‘exprès, exprès’ (‘specially, on purpose’) allows us to hear what in 1879 had simply been reported as his ‘bad French’.
Virginius: the story of the Roman father who killed his daughter Virginia to save her virtue from Appius, first told by Livy, was dramatized as Virginius in a popular play of 1820 by James Sheridan Knowles, and retold as ‘Virginia’ in one of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).
puff: or, as it would normally now be spelt, ‘pouf ‘or ‘pouffe’.
Sansovino: Jacopo Tatti Sansovino (c.1486–1570), Venetian architect and sculptor, whose works include the Library of St Mark, with the adjoining Mint and Loggia of the Campanile.
Corps Législatif: lit. ‘legislative body’ (of the French government), first constituted as such under the Consulate of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799.
la Rochefidèle: ‘Loyal Rock’. Compare the declaration of the young Marquise a few lines later that she is vieille roche, literally ‘old rock’ (see Glossary).
the Empire: the young Marquise dissociates herself from the pro-Bourbon circle of the Bellegardes which ‘pouts at’ the Second Empire of Napoleon III, in power from 1852–70.
your battles in the last century: in the American War of Independence (1776–83).
The great Dr Franklin: in 1878 Benjamin Franklin secured France’s support for the American revolutionaries, and stayed on in Paris until 1785. This means that M. de la Rochefidèle must now be in his mid-to-late 80s.
Andromeda . . . Perseus: Andromeda was fastened to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea-monster, and the hero Perseus rescued her.
Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name: legitimists such as the Bellegardes and their circle believed that the last true King of France had been Charles X (1824–30), and that the rightful claimant to the throne was his grandson Henri Charles Ferdinand, known to them as Henry V, but more generally as the Comte de Chambord. The elder line of the Bourbons was never to recover from the revolution of 1830. This saw the accession of Louis Philippe, of the younger line of the House of Orléans, overthrown in turn by the revolution of 1848. Newman remains oblivious to the enduring hostility between Legitimists and Orléanists, rival factions of the monarchist opposition to the Second Empire.
the new Offenbach things . . . ‘La Pomme de Paris’: the light operas of Jacques Offenbach (1819–80) were at the height of their popularity in the 1860s with hits such as La Belle Hélène (1864) and La Vie parisienne (1867). If ‘La Pomme de Paris’ is in fact ‘Pomme d’Api’, then it was not one of them, but a lesser thing of 1873—and hence an anachronism here—when the mood of the times had changed against him.
‘La Gazza Ladra’: The Thieving Magpie, by Gioacchino Rossini (1817).
falbalas: original form of ‘furbelows’ (see note to p. 40).
Madame Frezzolini: the Italian soprano Erminia Frezzolini (1818–84) was by 1868 at the very end of her career.
Rue Saint-Roch: this runs north–south connecting the Rue de Rivoli and the Avenue de l’Opéra.
Montmartre: working-class district on the northern margin of the tourist route, distinguished by the Baedekers of the time only for its cemetery.
intaglio: a precious stone with a figure or design cut into its surface.
tableaux vivants: a form of charade in which paintings or scenes from plays were represented in still-life.
green or yellow: Newman is not to know that to sport a green bow was to signal yourself a prostitute.
some historic figure painted by Vandyke: Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) painted portraits of the Genoese aristocracy in the 1620s, and spent his last years in England as court-painter to Charles I.
a lady of monstrous proportions: the Duchess is modelled on a princess of Saxe-Coburg whom James met, along with members of the Orléans family, at a reception at the Duc d’Aumale’s; she gave him ‘a realizing sense of what princesses are trained to’ (Edel, The Conquest of London).
Keats’s ‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’: Keats’s poem of 1820 tells the tale, all too ominously for Valentin, of a man enthralled and destroyed by a femme fatale, the Merciless Beauty of the title.
‘Don Giovanni’: Mozart’s opera of 1787, based on the legendary libertine of Seville, Don Juan.
Adelina Patti: the great Italian soprano (1843–1919) was in the 1860s still in the early years of her prime. She displaces the older ‘Madame Alboni’ of the 1879 text, the contralto Marietta Alboni (1823–94), whose heyday was past by 1868 (though she sang that year with Patti at Rossini’s funeral).
roulades: a quick succession of notes.
at night all cats are grey: James was fond of this common French proverb, La nuit, tous les chats sont gris.
feuilleton in the Figaro: a serialized story in this newspaper, of which James had a low opinion—’a most detestable sheet’, he told readers of his first New York Tribune letter, 22 November 1875 (Parisian Sketches).
Donna Elvira: seduced and abandoned by Don Giovanni, Donna Elvira’s situation is indeed not much like Madame de Cintré’s, but she shares her dignity and vows to end her days in a convent.
Zerlina: the country girl who just escapes the clutches of the seductive Don.
the Commander—the man of stone: the statue of the Commendatore, the father murdered by Don Giovanni while defending his daughter, Donna Anna.
Poitiers: where the Bellegardes have their country estate, Fleurières.
the Tuileries are dreadfully vulgar: the Palais des Tuileries was the official residence of the ruling Napoleon III and the ‘clever Bonapartes’, as it had been of their predecessors since the first Napoleon took up his quarters there in 1800. But the palace was about to be destroyed in the Commune of 1871.
the Latin Quarter: the Quartier Latin, on the Left Bank, a district dominated by University students and student life.
the stony circle of Paris: the city walls (in 1879, ‘the enceinte of Paris’—which would have suggested an echo of cintré, ‘girdled’).
Auteuil: Newman has walked west to reach this wealthy district next to the Bois de Boulogne.
Trocadéro: terraced embankment south of the Arc de Triomphe overlooking the Pont d’Iéna, soon to be embellished with the Palais du Trocadéro (1878) and a full view of the Eiffel Tower (1889) on the Left Bank.
the Jura: mountain range on the border between France and Switzerland.
canton: name given to each of the states comprising the Swiss confederation.
sabots: wooden clogs.
‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’: the infamous epistolary novel of 1782 by Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803). It supplanted, in the text of the first volume edition, the only slightly less shocking Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas (1789–90) by Louvet de Couvray, which had featured in the Atlantic Monthly serial version.
another Rothschild: the family famously associated with banking and finance.
his sacred vessel: the Communion chalice.
the reign of Henry III: James based the Bellegardes’ country-seat on a Château-Renard he saw when staying with the Edward Lee Childes at their own Varennes, near Montargis, in August 1876. In 1907 he pushed the origins of the château further back in time; in the early texts it had dated from the reign of Henry IV (1589–1610). The last monarch of the House of Valois, Henry of Anjou reigned as Henry III for fifteen wartorn years from 1574 until his assassination in 1589, when the crown passed to his remote cousin, Henry of Navarre, who became Henry IV, first monarch of the House of Bourbon.
a little Dutch-looking pavilion: these Dutch pavilions might suggest a promisingly Protestant element in the immense Catholic façade, or an historical possibility long lost in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Carlos Rowe points out that Holland was a refuge for many French Huguenots, and a stopping-place en route in due course to America (‘The Politics of Innocence’, in Banta (ed.), New Essays on The American). When Newman descends on Paris for the last time he finds that Mrs Bread has kept his rooms ‘as neat as a Dutch village’ (p. 357).
Carmelite nun: the strictness of the Carmelite order derives from the reforms made by St Teresa of Avila in 1562.
very Low: Low Church.
Avenue de Messine: just off the Boulevard Haussmann, where Newman has his apartment.
Rue d’Enfer: ‘Hell Street’. At the time of the novel’s setting there was not only a Rue d’Enfer, but a Boulevard, a Place, and a Passage, all d’Enfer, just to the east of the Montparnasse Cemetery. They have all been renamed. The Rue d’Enfer (now Rue Denfert-Rochereau and Rue Henri Barbusse) ran north-east from the Place d’Enfer (now Denfert-Rochereau) across the Avenue de l’Observatoire to link up with the Boulevard St Michel. Edwin Sill Fussell notes a ‘Couvent de la Visitation’ or ‘Couvent des Dames Carmélites’ marked on the 1872 Galignani map (The French Side of Henry James (New York, 1990)).
Arkansaw: evidently James’s idea of a very rough place. In 1879 Newman’s sentence had stopped at ‘It’s too rough.’
Parc Monceau: Baedeker declared this, recently converted into a public park, ‘a pleasant and refreshing oasis in the midst of a well-peopled quarter of the city’.
landau: four-wheeled carriage with removable top.
pink-covered novels: an apparently anachronistic reference to the novels of George Sand, reissued in this distinctive form in the early 1870s.
the brutal Sardinian rule: a reference to Victor Emmanuel, now King of Italy.
was he to have brayed like that animal whose ears are longest: in 1879 Newman had more simply thought ‘he had come very near being an ass’.
‘sympathetic’: the French sympathique has more active associations of like-ability than its reactive English counterpart.
panoply: a complete suit of armour.
Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde: the Obelisk of Luxor, presented to Louis Philippe by the Pasha of Egypt and erected in 1836.
‘the season’: the three months from May to July, when fashionable society gathered in London.
Kensington Gardens . . . the adjoining Drive: the Gardens are situated immediately to the west of Hyde Park, while ‘the Drive’ in the latter was patronized, especially during ‘the season’, by the carriages of everyone who was anyone.
Windsor Forest . . . Madame Tussaud’s exhibition: Newman is again being a dutiful tourist visiting all the recommended sites, though Sheffield is certainly off the beaten track, a stray thought from his past existence in ‘business’.
‘fit’: to his clothes, presumably.
his occupation had gone: a reminiscence of Othello’s great lament, in the grip of his belief that he has lost Desdemona for ever: ‘Othello’s occupation’s’ gone’ (111. iii. 357). See also note to p. 131.
Saint Veronica: out of pity for Christ on the way to Calvary, she wiped his face with a cloth which is supposed to have retained the imprint of his features.
station: like a station of the Cross—an addition in 1907 which reinforces the religious associations of the ‘stony sepulchre’ in which he thinks of Claire being entombed.
Notre Dame: the cathedral on the Île de la Cité, the most ancient part of Paris, built over nearly 200 years from 1163 to 1345. It features again at critical moments of ‘recognition’ in The Tragic Muse (1890), Book Second, ch. 9, and The Ambassadors (1903), Book Seventh, ch. 1.
draw his breath a while in pain: a reminiscence of Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio, added in 1907:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
(v. ii. 298–301)
In 1879 Newman merely ‘drew a longer breath than usual’.
‘poor Claire’: Edwin Sill Fussell points out that ‘Poor Clares are the Second (Women’s) Order of Franciscans’—vowed to poverty (The Catholic Side of Henry James (Cambridge, 1993)).