Henry James

“ I’ll agree to anything!” cried Newman.
Mr. Babcock buried his head in both hands. At last looking up, “I don’t think you appreciate my position,” he said. “I try to arrive at the truth about everything. And then you go too fast. For me, you are too passionate, too extravagant. I feel as if I ought to go over all this ground we have traversed again, by myself, alone. I am afraid I have made a great many mistakes.”
“Oh, you needn’t give so many reasons,” said Newman. “You are simply tired of my company. You have a good right to be.” ”

“ You are a successful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables to talk as if I could lend you a hand.”
“In what way are you a failure?” asked Newman.
“Oh, I’m not a tragical failure!” cried the young man with a laugh. “I have fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise. You, evidently, are a success. You have made a fortune, you have built up an edifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel about the world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it with the consciousness of having earned your rest. ”

“ He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe. He had said that he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even—a false shame, possibly—if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man’s life should be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege into a matter of course. The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar, where one might stroll about and purchase handsome things ”

“ He had not only a dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust, of uncomfortable thoughts, and it was both uncomfortable and slightly contemptible to feel obliged to square one’s self with a standard. One’s standard was the ideal of one’s own good-humored prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take. To expand, without bothering about it—without shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other—to the full compass of what he would have called a “pleasant” experience, was Newman’s most definite programme of life. ”

“ Newman gave a powerful thump with his clenched fist upon his knee. “Why, why, why?” he cried. “Give me a reason—a decent reason. You are not a child—you are not a minor, nor an idiot. You are not obliged to drop me because your mother told you to. Such a reason isn’t worthy of you.”
“I know that; it’s not worthy of me. But it’s the only one I have to give. After all,” said Madame de Cintré, throwing out her hands, “think me an idiot and forget me! That will be the simplest way.” ”

“ M. Nioche, as a reduced capitalist, was familiar with these considerations, and he formulated his information, which he was proud to be able to impart, in the neatest possible terms and with a pinch of snuff between finger and thumb. As a Frenchman—quite apart from Newman’s napoleons—M. Nioche loved conversation, and even in his decay his urbanity had not grown rusty. As a Frenchman, too, he could give a clear account of things, and—still as a Frenchman—when his knowledge was at fault he could supply its lapses with the most convenient and ingenious hypotheses. ”

“ There is nothing very gay in this solemn old Louvre. But we will see what we can find. You speak French to-day like a charm. My father has done wonders.”
“Oh, I am a bad subject,” said Newman. “I am too old to learn a language.”
“Too old? Quelle folie!” cried Mademoiselle Noémie, with a clear, shrill laugh. “You are a very young man. And how do you like my father?”
“He is a very nice old gentleman. He never laughs at my blunders.”
“He is very comme il faut, my papa,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, “and as honest as the day. Oh, an exceptional probity! You could trust him with millions.” ”

“ I am not intellectual.”
“One doesn’t expect it of you,” Mrs. Tristram answered. Then in a moment, “Besides, you are!”
“Well, I mean to have a good time, whether or no,” said Newman. “I am not cultivated, I am not even educated; I know nothing about history, or art, or foreign tongues, or any other learned matters. But I am not a fool, either, and I shall undertake to know something about Europe by the time I have done with it. I feel something under my ribs here,” he added in a moment, “that I can’t explain—a sort of a mighty hankering, a desire to stretch out and haul in.” ”

“ I shall be sitting in a gondola or on a dromedary, or on a cushion at the feet of Beauty, and all of a sudden I shall want to clear out. But for the present I'm perfectly free. I've even arranged that I'm to receive no business letters."
"Oh, it's a real caprice de prince," said Tristram. "I back out; a poor devil like me can't help you to spend such very magnificent leisure as that. You should get introduced to the crowned heads."
Newman considered a moment and then with all his candour, "How does one do it?" he asked.
"Come, I like that!" cried Tristram. "It shows you're in earnest." ”

“ And I like being here; it is a place to come to, every day; it is better than sitting in a little dark, damp room, on a court, or selling buttons and whalebones over a counter.”
“Of course it is much more amusing,” said Newman. “But for a poor girl isn’t it rather an expensive amusement?”
“Oh, I am very wrong, there is no doubt about that,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “But rather than earn my living as some girls do—toiling with a needle, in little black holes, out of the world—I would throw myself into the Seine.” ”

“ I fancy you going about the world like a man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock. You make me feel as if I had missed something. What is it?”
“It is the proud consciousness of honest toil—of having manufactured a few wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.
“Oh no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made not only wash-tubs, but soap—strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars; and they never made me the least uncomfortable.”
“Then it’s the privilege of being an American citizen,” said Newman. “That sets a man up.” ”

“ Newman took an interest in the wondrous French thrift and conceived a lively admiration for Parisian economies. His own economic genius was so entirely for operations on a larger scale, and, to move at his ease, he needed so imperatively the sense of great risks and great prizes, that he found diversion akin to the watching of ants in the spectacle of fortunes made by the aggregation of copper coins and in the minute subdivision of labour and profit. He questioned M. Nioche about his own manner of life and felt a friendly mixture of compassion and respect for the mystery of these humilities. ”

“ Mrs. Bread sat with a dull, oblique gaze fixed on the Fleurières lights. "They worked on her sentiments, as they call em here; they knew that was the way. She's a delicate creature. They made her feel wicked. She's only too good."
"Ah, they made her feel wicked," said Newman, slowly; and then he repeated it. "They made her feel wicked—they made her feel wicked." The words represented to him for the moment, and quite as to the point of high interest, a wondrous triumph of infernal art.
"It was because she was so good that she gave up—poor sweet lady!" added Mrs. Bread. ”

“ You must be, to have endeared yourself to this good marquis and to his admirable world. They are very exacting. I myself am not very sure at this hour of really possessing it. Eh, Bellegarde? To please you, I see, one must be an American millionaire. But your real triumph, my dear sir, is pleasing the countess; she is as difficult as a princess in a fairy tale. Your success is a miracle. What is your secret? I don’t ask you to reveal it before all these gentlemen, but come and see me some day and give me a specimen of your talents.”
“The secret is with Madame de Cintré,” said Newman. ”

“ I appreciate all you say; you do me great honor. But I have decided not to marry.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” cried Newman, in a tone absolutely naïf from its pleading and caressing cadence. She had turned away, and it made her stop a moment with her back to him. “Think better of that. You are too young, too beautiful, too much made to be happy and to make others happy. If you are afraid of losing your freedom, I can assure you that this freedom here, this life you now lead, is a dreary bondage to what I will offer you. You shall do things that I don’t think you have ever thought of. ”

“ Every one gave Newman extreme attention, every one lighted up for him regardless, as he would have said, of expense, every one was enchanted to make his acquaintance, every one looked at him with that fraudulent intensity of good society which puts out its bountiful hand but keeps the fingers closed over the coin. If the Marquis was going about as a bear-leader, if the fiction of Beauty and the Beast was supposed to show thus its companion-piece, the general impression appeared that the bear was a very fair imitation of humanity. ”

“ M. de Bellegarde was leaning against a column, motionless, looking straight in front of him, with one hand in the breast of his white waistcoat and the other resting his hat on his thigh. Newman was about to leave his place when he noticed in that obscure region devoted to the small boxes which in France are called, not inaptly, “bathing-tubs,” a face which even the dim light and the distance could not make wholly indistinct. It was the face of a young and pretty woman, and it was surmounted with a coiffure of pink roses and diamonds. ”

“ That makes me hope that after all you prefer me.”
“Oh, when things are nice I never prefer one to the other,” said the young Englishman. “I take them all.”
“Ah, what a horror! I won’t be taken in that way; I must be kept apart,” cried Madame de Bellegarde. “Mr. Newman is much better; he knows how to choose. Oh, he chooses as if he were threading a needle. He prefers Madame de Cintré to any conceivable creature or thing.”
“Well, you can’t help my being her cousin,” said Lord Deepmere to Newman, with candid hilarity. ”

“ But if that is the way you feel about her, why couldn’t you let her alone?”
Valentin shook his head with a fine smile. “I don’t think you quite understand, and I don’t believe I can make you. She understood the situation; she knew what was in the air; she was watching us.”
“A cat may look at a king! What difference does that make?”
“Why, a man can’t back down before a woman.”
“I don’t call her a woman. You said yourself she was a stone,” cried Newman.
“Well,” Valentin rejoined, “there is no disputing about tastes. It’s a matter of feeling; it’s measured by one’s sense of honor.” ”

“ Tristram nodded at the Titians and Vandykes—"these, I suppose, are originals?"
"I hope so," said Newman. "I don't want a copy of a copy."
"Ah," his friend sagaciously returned, "you can never tell. They imitate, you know, so deucedly well. It's like the jewellers with their false stones. Go into the Palais Royal there; you see 'Imitation' on half the windows. The law obliges them to stick it on, you know; but you can't tell the things apart. To tell the truth," Mr. Tristram continued—and his grimace seemed a turn of the screw of discrimination—"I don't do so very much in pictures. ”

“ Newman now imperturbably proceeded, "and, speaking it for a purpose, I desire you shall have no genuine doubt of it. You made Valentin's last hour an hour of anguish, and my friend's generous spirit repudiates your abominable act."
Urbain de Bellegarde had, from whatever emotion, turned so pale that it might have been at the evoked spectre of his brother; but not for an appreciable instant did his mother lower her crest. You have beau jeu, as we say, before the silence of the grave, for every calumny and every insult. But I don't know," she admirably wound up, "that it in the least matters." ”

“ Madame de Cintré fixed him a moment with her swimming eyes. "You believe I'm hard then?"
He glared as if at her drowning beyond help; then he broke out: "You're a perfect, faultless, priceless creature! For God's sake, stay by me!"
"Of course I'm hard in effect," she pitifully reasoned; "though if ever a creature was innocent, in intention—! Whenever we give pain we're hard. And we must give pain; that's the world—the hateful miserable world! ”

“ Madame de Cintré pleased him so, exactly as she was, that his desire to interpose between her and the troubles of life had the quality of a young mother’s eagerness to protect the sleep of her first-born child. Newman was simply charmed, and he handled his charm as if it were a music-box which would stop if one shook it. There can be no better proof of the hankering epicure that is hidden in every man’s temperament, waiting for a signal from some divine confederate that he may safely peep out. ”

“ Valentin rejoined. “Mademoiselle Nioche is like the great artists whose biographies we read, who at the beginning of their career have suffered opposition in the domestic circle. Their vocation has not been recognized by their families, but the world has done it justice. Mademoiselle Nioche has a vocation.”
“Oh, come,” said Newman, impatiently, “you take the little baggage too seriously.”
“I know I do; but when one has nothing to think about, one must think of little baggages. I suppose it is better to be serious about light things than not to be serious at all. ”

“ M. de Bellegarde stood in a well-balanced position before the fire, caressing one of his fair whiskers with one of his white hands, and looking at Newman, half askance, with eyes from which a particular ray of observation made its way through a general meaningless smile. “It is very kind of you to make such an offer,” he said. “If I am not mistaken, your occupations are such as to make your time precious. You are in—a—as we say, dans les affaires.”
“In business, you mean? Oh no, I have thrown business overboard for the present. I am ‘loafing,’ as we say. My time is quite my own.” ”