The Ambassadors by Henry James (read people like a book .TXT) 📕

“You’ll only help me with her? Well then⁠—!” Most of the persons previously gathered had, in the interest of tea, passed into the house, and they had the gardens mainly to themselves. The shadows were long, the last call of the birds, who had made a home of their own in the noble interspaced quarter, sounded from the high trees in the other gardens as well, those of the old convent and of the old hotels; it was as if our friends had waited for the full charm to come out. Strether’s impressions were still present; it was as if something had happened that “nailed” them, made them more intense; but he was to ask himself soon afterwards, that evening, what really had happened⁠—conscious as he could after all remain that for a gentleman taken, and taken the first time, into the “great world,” the world of ambassadors and duchesses, the items made a meagre total. It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a man might have⁠—at all events such a man as he⁠—an amount of experience out of any proportion to his adventures; so that, though it was doubtless no great adventure to sit on there with Miss Gostrey and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour, the picture, the immediate, the recent, the possible⁠—as well as the communication itself, not a note of which failed to reverberate⁠—only gave the moments more of the taste of history.

It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne’s mother had been three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then, though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop, other glimpses of her. Twenty-three years put them both on, no doubt; and Madame de Vionnet⁠—though she had married straight after school⁠—couldn’t be today an hour less than thirty-eight. This made her ten years older than Chad⁠—though ten years, also, if Strether liked, older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that a prospective mother-in-law could be expected to do with. She would be of all mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through some perversity as yet insupposeable, she should utterly belie herself in that relation. There was none surely in which, as Maria remembered her, she mustn’t be charming; and this frankly in spite of the stigma of failure in the tie where failure always most showed. It was no test there⁠—when indeed was it a test there?⁠—for Monsieur de Vionnet had been a brute. She had lived for years apart from him⁠—which was of course always a horrid position; but Miss Gostrey’s impression of the matter had been that she could scarce have made a better thing of it had she done it on purpose to show she was amiable. She was so amiable that nobody had had a word to say; which was luckily not the case for her husband. He was so impossible that she had the advantage of all her merits.

It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet⁠—it being also history that the lady in question was a Countess⁠—should now, under Miss Gostrey’s sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of the question. “Ces gens-là don’t divorce, you know, any more than they emigrate or abjure⁠—they think it impious and vulgar”; a fact in the light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Strether’s imagination, more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching creature, then both sensitive and violent, audacious but always forgiven, was the daughter of a French father and an English mother who, early left a widow, had married again⁠—tried afresh with a foreigner; in her career with whom she had apparently given her child no example of comfort. All these people⁠—the people of the English mother’s side⁠—had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It was in any case her belief that the mother, interested and prone to adventure, had been without conscience, had only thought of ridding herself most quickly of a possible, an actual encumbrance. The father, by her impression, a Frenchman with a name one knew, had been a different matter, leaving his child, she clearly recalled, a memory all fondness, as well as an assured little fortune which was unluckily to make her more or less of a prey later on. She had been in particular, at school, dazzlingly, though quite booklessly, clever; as polyglot as a little Jewess (which she wasn’t, oh no!) and chattering French, English, German, Italian, anything one would, in a way that made a clean sweep, if not of prizes and parchments, at least of every “part,” whether memorised or improvised, in the curtained costumed school repertory, and in especial of all mysteries of race and vagueness of reference, all swagger about “home,” among their variegated mates.

It would doubtless be difficult today, as between French and English, to name her and place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who don’t keep you explaining⁠—minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued cluster of confessionals at Saint Peter’s. You might confess to her with confidence in Roumelian, and even Roumelian sins. Therefore⁠—! But Strether’s narrator covered her implication with a laugh; a laugh by which his betrayal of