The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721).

VOLUME XVII. Later National Literature, Part II.

XII. Henry

James.

1. The Question of Jamess Americanism.

HENRY JAMES was born an American and died an Englishman. He might never have
formally transferred his allegiance had it not been for the War and our long delay in
espousing the Allied cause. He became a British subject in July, 1915. The transfer had,
however, been virtually made many decades earlier. Of the two ruling passions of
James, one was surely his passion for Europe. Of this infatuation the reader will find
the most explicit record in his fragmentary book of reminiscences, The Middle Years
(1917), record and whimsical apology which may well serve the needs of other
Americans pleading indulgence for the same offence. James loved Europe, as do all
passionate pilgrims, for the thick-crowding literary and historical associations which
made it seem more alive than the more bustling scene this side the water. Going to
breakfast in London was an adventure,being not, as at Harvard, merely one of the
incidents of boarding, but a social function, calling up the ghosts of Byron and
Sheridan and Scott and Moore and Lockhart and Rogers and tutti quanti. In America,
James had never so taken breakfast except once with a Boston lady frankly reminiscent
of London, and once with Howells fresh from his Venetian post, and so all in the
Venetian manner. Everybody in Victorian London had, as he calls it, referencesthat
is, associations, appeal to the historic imagination; and, as he humorously confesses, a
reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most becoming
ornament possible. It was with bated breath that he approached the paintings of
Titian in the old National Gallery; and when, in the presence of the Bacchus and
Ariadne, he became aware, at the same moment, of the auburn head and eager talk of
Swinburne, his cup for that day ran over. With the best of introductions to the Rome of
Story, the London of Lord Houghton, the highest ambition of James was to establish
connections of his own with a world in which everything so bristled with
connections; and it is he who lets us know with what joy he found himself, on the
occasion of his first visit to George Eliot, running for the doctor in her service, since
thereby a relation had been dramatically determined.
Ward & Trent, et al. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. New
York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 190721; New York: Bartleby.com, 2000
(www.bartleby.com/cambridge/). [

2. His Passion for Europe.

But it is only in the light of his other ruling passion that we can rightly understand the
force of his passion for Europe. Even more rooted was his love for art, the art of
representation. All his pilgriming in London and elsewhere was by way of collecting a
fund of material to draw upon as soon as ever one should seriously get to work. And

is it surprising that he should have been impressed with the greater eligibility of the
foreign material; that his impressions of New York and Boston seemed to him
negative or thin or flat beside the corresponding impressions of London? The old
world was one which had been lived in and had taken on the expressive character of
places long associated with human use. It was not simply the individual object of
observation, but the cross-references; or, again, the association of one object with
another and with the past, making up altogether a composition. Whatever person or
setting caught his attention, it was always because it would fall into a picture or a
scene. Of the heroine of The American, a young French woman of rank, the hero
observed that she was a kind of historical formation. And along with his material,
James found abroad a favourable air in which to do his work. There he found those
stimulating contacts, there he could observe from within those movements in the world
of art, which were of such prime importance for his own development. Lambert
Strether, in The Ambassadors, represents the deprivations of a man of letters, strikingly
suggestive in many ways of James himself, condemned to labour in the provincial
darkness of Woollett, Massachusetts.
In all this our American author seems identified with anything but the American scene;
and the case is not altered when we consider his stories on the side of form. His form is
not American, nor his preoccupation with form. It is as strictly international as that of
Poe. James was a profound admirer of Hawthorne; but so was he an admirer of Balzac
and of George Sand, and it is probably to later models than any of these that he owes
whatever is most characteristic in his technique. There is at any rate nothing here drawn
from American sources rather than from European; nothing which we can claim as our
production.
Yet we have reasons for our claim upon him. This very passion for Europe, as he has
exhibited it in himself and in so many of his creatures, this European adventure of
Lambert Strether and Isabel Archer (of The Portrait of a Lady)what more purely
American product can be conceived? Even to the conscientiousness with which young
James did his London sightseeing, mindful of his own feeble health, which threatened
to cut it short, and above all mindful that what he was doing, could he but put it
through, would be intimately good for him!

3. Americans in His Stories.

Altogether his theme turned out to be quite as much American character as European
setting. We must not forget how predominantly his novels, and how frequently his
short stories, have for their subject Americans,Americans abroad, or even
Americans at home seen in the light of foreign observation. In this connection the
novels in particular may be divided into three groups, falling chronologically into
three periods. In the first period, extending from Roderick Hudson to The Bostonians,
1875 to 1885, the leading characters are invariably Americans, though the scene is
half the time abroad. In the second period, from The Princess Casamassima to The
Sacred Fount, 1885 to 1901, the novels confine themselves rather strictly to English
society. In the third period, from The Wings of the Dove to the novels left unfinished at
the authors death, 1902 to 1917, James returned to his engrossing, and by far his most
interesting, theme of Americans in Paris or Venice or London. Not a very original

contribution to literature is the American scene itselfthe New York of Washington

Square (1881), the Boston of The Europeans (1878) and The Bostonians; and none of
these novels was included by James in the New York Edition. His American settings
are but palely conceived; and his figures do not find here the proper background to
bring them out and set off their special character. But the crusading Americans
variegated types, comic and romanticwith the foreign settings in which they so
perfectly find themselves, these make up a local province as distinct in colour and
feature as those of Cable 1 and Bret Harte, 2 a province quite as American, in its
way, and for the artist quite as much of a trouvaille, or lucky strike.
These Americans abroad fall naturally into two classes. The first are treated in the
mildly comic vein, as examples of American crudeness or simplicity. Such are the
unhappy Ruck family of The Pension Beaurepas,poor Mr. Ruck who had come
abroad in hopes of regaining health and escaping financial worries, and his ladies
whose interest in the old world is confined to the shops where money can be spent.
Perhaps we might refer to this class Christopher Newman, the self-possessed and
efficient American business man, hero of The American (1877); though in his case the
comedy of character is by no means broad, and is strictly subordinate to the larger
comedy of social contrast. In general, these people are treated not unkindly; and there
is the one famous instance of Daisy Miller, in which the fresh little American girl is so
tenderly handled as to set tears flowinga most unusual proceeding with James.
Generally the Americans emerge from the international comedy with the readers
esteem for sterling virtues not always exhibited by the more sophisticated Europeans.
In the later group of stories in particular, the American character, presented with no
hint of comic bias, actually shines with the lustre of a superior spiritual fineness. This
is what Rebecca West has in mind in her somewhat impatient reference to Jamess
characters as American old maids, or words to that effect.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881), which records at length the European initiation of a
15
generous-souled American girl.

11. Later Novels.

Along with The Spoils of Poynton may be mentioned, among the later novels, The
Sacred Fount (1901) and What Maisie Knew (1897) as partaking somewhat of the
nature of long short stories. What Maisie Knew is, by the way, in a class by itself,
not merely for reasons of technique too special to be considered here, but also by
reason of the great charm of the little girlso nave, so earnest, so much a lady
and so much a girl, whose experience of evil is the subject of the story.
For the full-fledged novels of the later period, it will suffice to state briefly the
themes of The Awkward Age (1899) and The Golden Bowl (1904)without
prejudice, however, to the special claims of The Ambassadors, the novel
considered by James himself to be his most perfect work of art. The Awkward Age
is concerned with the adjustment called for in a certain London circle by the
emergence of the jeune fille and the consideration due her innocence of the world.
The adjustments prove to be very extensive, but almost wholly subjective, and
leaving things very much where they were before so far as any outward signs go.
The book is almost literally all talk,the talk of people the most civilized and

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modern, people the most shy of vulgarity, who have ever been put in a book.
It is a fascinating performancefor those who have the patience to read it. The
Golden Bowl is a study of a theme not unlike that of The Portrait of a Lady. It is
the story of an American girl who marries an Italian prince, and the strategy by
which she wins his loyal affection. The time covered is much shorter than that in
the Portrait, the important characters only about half as many, the amount of
action much smaller: and there is little change of scene as compared with the
earlier novel. The length of the book is about the same; and the space saved by
these various economies is devoted to the leisurely development of a single
situation as it shaped itself gradually in the minds of those participating, the
steady deepening of a sense of mystery and misgiving, the tightening of emotional
tension, to a degree that means great drama for all readers for whom it does not
mean a very dull book.
For many readers it certainly means a very dull book. In this recipe for a story
almost everything has been discarded which was the staple of the earlier English
novel, even of George Eliot,exciting incident, dramatic situation, highly
coloured character and dialogue, humour, philosophy, social comment. Indeed, we
may almost say the story itself has been thrown out with the rest. For in the later
novels and tales of James there is not so much a story told as a situation revealed;
revealed to the characters and so to us; and the process of gradual revelation, the
calculated release of one item after anotherthat is the plot. It is as if we were
present at the painting of a picture by a distinguished artist, as if we were invited
to follow the successive strokes by which this or that detail of his conception was
made to bloom upon the canvas; and when the last bit of oil had been applied, he
should turn to us and say Now you have heard Sordellos story told. Some of us
would be satisfied with the excitement of having assisted at such a function,
considering also the picture which had thus come into being. Others,and it is
human nature, no doubt,would exclaim in vexed bewilderment But I have
heard no story told!

14. American Faith and European Culture.

This, we say of James, is anything but American, indigenous; this is the Zeitgeist;
this is the spirit of England in the sthetic nineties reacting against the spirit of
England in the time of Carlyle. But then we think of the passionate pilgrimage of
Isabel Archer and the others; we think of Jamess Middle Years; we think, it may be,
of ourselves and eastward prostrations of our own. And we realize that what the
romancer has conjured up is a world not strange to our experience. His genius is not
the less American for presenting us, before all things, this vision of a bride rushing
into the arms of her bridegroom: vision of the mystic marriage (shall we say?) of
new-world faith and old-world culture.

French words in The Ambassadors

In order to give a point to the rather small focus I've set myself in
this paper, I'm going to take up half my paper with a couple of large
assertions about The Ambassadors, and about the significance of the
novel as a turning point in James's oeuvre.
James's fundamental project in writing The Ambassadors is his
juxtaposition of two different worlds, two different value systems, two
different ways of seeing. Strether in trying to find a way of mediating
between these two worlds occupies successive somewhat inglorious
positions; he has to be ambassador for the New World's offended prudery,
then spokesman for the Old World's licentiousness. In the cultural map
that James is making in his writing, he is interested in differentiating
the forms that the life of the leisured classes takes inside all the
national cultures he touches upon; American ways from English ways,
French from Italian (and, for that matter, also, Bostonians from New
Yorkers, Paris from the French countryside). But at the bottom of this
minutely differentiated complexity lies an argument which James is
forever taking up and refining upon, and which he never closes, between
the Old World and the New. Those very terms, of course, make the coexistence in geographical space of these cultural differences also work
on another axis, between past and present, tradition and modernity.
England shifts position on this axis, sometimes aligned with the new
(as, for instance, in the analysis of afin-de-sicle breakdown of the
gender system based on the virginal sheltered innocence of girls, in
What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age), sometimes opposing to a newer
America its labyrinthine old corruption (in TheWings of the Dove ).
Such crude reductions cry out for complication; and the first
complication is that in fact so many of these cultural differences are
in fact played out in the novels between Americans and Americans;
Gilbert Osmond and Mme Merle's dark Old World secret defined against the
New World freshness of Isabel Archer; the American Misses Bourdereaux
fighting for their precious old history against the American critic;
Charlotte Stant partnering the (rare, authentic) Italian Prince in their
Old Worldish adultery; little Bilham and Miss Barrace arguing for Paris
against Waymarsh and Sarah Pocock. Even Marie de Vionnet - embodiment,
as James insists over and over, of an old tradition of Continental
womanhood - is half English. This must have been the solution James
found to the problem of what feels crude and inauthentic in his
treatment of the Old World/ New World theme in his novelThe American. He
can enact the argument without having to pretend to render both sides
with the same inwardness; the Old World can be encountered and its
appeal and its potency evoked through the mediation of his crowd of
expatriate conoisseurs, who represent no doubt both a reality in the
period in question and also a superbly useful novelistic invention.
Again, England is the exception; James can 'do' England from
inside as confidently as he can 'do' America. Maisie's London life, just
to take one instance, can be confidently rendered in all its minute
ordinary detail; but France in that novel, essential in its otherness to
the novel's arguments about pleasure and judgement, is only

tantalisingly seen and smelt and heard, through the carriage window or
from the hotel balcony, by the appreciatively responsive and respectful
sightseer. Maisie in the end, however, is able to construct out of her
experience of France her freedom from the narrow values of a more or
less hypocritical English pedagogy: she ends up, as Strether ends up,
detached from either way of seeing things. The very juxtaposition
itself, the vantage point overlooking the two mutually exclusive systems
of arrangements for living, liberates them both; and perhaps consigns
them both to a particular kind of loneliness.
The pivot upon which James's Old World/ New World argument turns
in his writing is upon the sexual arrangements inside the different
cultural spaces. Isabel Archer's American upbringing has done nothing to
prepare her for her husband's Old World-style cynicism or his sordid
secrets. Woollett won't tolerate the conventional Parisian arrangement
by which an older married woman initiates and refines a younger man. The
American critic in 'The Aspern Papers' contemplates the erotic life of
the poet with a characteristic mixture of prurient fascination and
distaste. Milly Theale won't, in the end, come to Merton's Venice room
where Kate has already been. It seems to me that one of the crucial
dynamics in the whole development of James's oeuvre is a process of
radical revision in James's apprehension and rendering of the ethics of
those different systems of sexual arrangement. In the course of his
exploring the arrangements in his writing, he grows to inhabit
eventually exactly that lonely and liberated vantage point between
systems that Maisie and Strether inhabit at the end of their novels. In
The Portrait of a Lady our sympathies, however qualified, are with
Isabel's brave clean and rather virginal imagination, which has perhaps
never completely outgrown the schooling she missed in the little Dutch
House in Albany; the sexually experienced and exploiting villains are
fairly unequivocally villainous, and even to some extent punished
(Osmond loses advantage in his fight with Isabel; Madame Merle loses
everything). In The Golden Bowl it is as though Mme Merle is given back
youth and beauty - and our sympathy - to weigh in the scale against her
rival, a good bright girl on the Isabel Archer model; the novel is
structured around its unresolvable argument between the sins of the Old
World (old-fashioned-Continental-adulterous) and the sins of the New
(puritan-appropriative-infantilising).
'Old World' and 'New' are of course ideas and as such difficult to
interrogate as realities external to the writing; but then the argument
in James's fiction is also an argument between two novel traditions. The
English-language tradition, evolved under the pens of so many women
writers and in crucial relationship to its female readership, eschewed
an improper sexuality and took form primarily inside what Ruth Bernard
Yeazell has called the 'space of courtship between love and marriage'.
On the other hand the Continental tradition, with its predomination of
male authors, was centred upon the transgressive space of adultery; as
Tony Tanner has it, on 'the tension between law and sympathy'. James's
sceptical transitional fictions of the eighteen-nineties are
interrogations of the traditional values of the English-language novel:
an idealising chaste femininity; a problematical and sometimes even
pathological propriety (I'm thinking of Maisie, The Awkward Age, 'The
Turn of the Screw'). These fictions are about, precisely, the hold old
ways of thinking about sex and old sexual taboos have upon imagination;
they are about the processes inside a given culture for unlearning

sexual superstitions, and about how those superstitions, once uprooted,

shake the very foundations of a way of living and imagining.
It is this 'unlearning' of old ways of thinking that makes
possible the liberated poise of The Ambassadors, in which James is able
to hold both ways of seeing open inside the same novel. Strether's
pivotal moment of recognition, when the lovers whom he had hoped against
hope would be conveniently 'virtuous' for him, turn out to do after all
the ordinary things that real lovers do, feels like the embodiment of
the history of James's own writing: from his beginnings in a moralised
English-language tradition, James has made something like Strether's
journey to voluptuous imaginings of pleasure. The late novels seem to me
to represent an acceptance of the force of desire, the power of bodies,
and the beauty of pleasure; in contradistinction to that tradition of
imagination which has always stressed the power of sacrfice, the beauty
of suffering, and the noble ideal of chastity.
The reason that Frenchness - and, hovering as a shadow-presence
behind the English utterance of the novel, French language and
expression - is crucial to The Ambassadors, is because James is
stretching and pushing Englishness to express something new; he wants
reference to another range and register to help him make out in English
a new way of taking things. He has always invoked France, in his
cultural mapping of the North Atlantic leisure-class, to stand for the
sensual and the beautiful; for pleasure. (Italy too has its special
function in the writing; but it is never so sharply focussed as an
alternative system to the moralising and conscientious English-language
one.) The scattering of actual French words in the text as we have it is
there to stand for a residue of untranslatable difference; and, at the
same time, for the capacity of English to rise to express the
difference.
Of course it would be difficult to find a novel written before
1950 that didn't have its sprinkling of French; French has had a special
status as the European language reached for by the educated everywhere
to express a certain range of apprehension: subtle, worldly, knowing,
communicating cleverly the nuances of social performance. There's a
whole history to be made out, of the role inside the novel of the French
language in relation to other European languages, in that long period
when, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it 'the enlightened, the worldly, the
chasers of fashion, all wanted to know what had just happened in
Parisian intellectual salons'._ In the Russian novel, of course, a
fundamental and profoundly problematic East-West polarity expresses
itself partly through this issue of the French language, and the so
different worlds that French and Russian speak.
It is a gesture in very poor taste on my part to draw attention to
the French in James's novel. There's absolutely nothing meretricious in
James's sprinkling his text with French words; the very last effect he's
aiming at is any sort of demonstration of his own fluency. Fluency in
this world of sophisticated cosmopolites has to go without saying or
it's not the real thing. The question of 'translation' at the most
literal level simply does not arise: even Sarah Pocock presumably knows
how to talk to her lingre. (This is another thorny narrative problem
solved by James's use of Americans to enact the qualities of his
European cultures: even in The American the young Bellegardes have their

mother, daughter of the Earl of St Dunstan's, to help account for their

sounding so at home in English.) Attention in The Ambassadors is is only
once drawn, in all the conversations Strether has with Marie de Vionnet,
to any difficulty he might have in following her in French (I'll return
to that once, later).
Strolling the boulevards in unaccustomed freedom, turning over on
the street bookstalls the lemon-yellow paperbacks that in all James's
writing stand for initiations French and literary and thrilling, or
drinking beer in crowded cafs at 'populous midnight', Strether knows
from the beginning that he's going to like Paris too much. There is an
incantatory magic in his simply listing the Place de l'Opera, the
Boulevard Malesherbes, the 'troisime', and so on; conjuring the power
for the imagination of a given place in a given era. Maria Gostrey's
little entresol in the Quartier Marboeuf, crowded with precious old
things and the warm life of her intelligent interest, has to stay in
French; likewise the porte-cochre, redolent of past grandeurs, the
significant threshold through which Strether has to pass in order to go
up to Chad's apartment.
The French words are often an invocation of a social amenity, a
sheer practised expertise in all those innumerable arrangements that
keep the privileged classes pleasured with so little sign of sweat: the
ouvreuse who shows Chad into their box at the Opera; the petit bleu, the
telegrams which whizz about the city through pneumatic tube, sent off
from the reliable Postes et Tlgraphiques.. The omelette aux tomates
in the Paris restauraunt, and the cotelette de veau l'oseille ordered
at the country auberge, simply won't translate into tomato omelette and
veal cutlets. There are aspects of Paris which even the least permeable
visitors can't afford to resist; even Sarah Pocock buys her presumably
exquisitely superior underclothes from the lingre for whom there will be
no equivalent back home.
The eminently permeable ones learn so much; Chad is so altered
from the raw American youth he was, polished and competent and knowing,
so that even his shade of shyness is 'mere good taste'. When these
sophisticated Parisian-Americans reach for French expressions in their
conversation, it's often where they want to express the nuances of 'good
taste'; judgement doesn't make reference to conscience but rather to how
something will go down, or how it will seem; often reversing the
obvious, vulgar, likelihood. Miss Barrace says that Waymarsh will be a
succs fou, when we might rather expect them to find him a dull flop.
When Maria Gostrey comments on the coincidence of Strether's meeting the
lovers in the country, she says quoi se fier?, meaning effectively
'what are the odds against that?', but literally, 'what can you trust
in?': good taste requires a shrug of unsurprise, not displays of moral
outrage.
Twice, Chad incites Strether to 'see', in French: Allez donc voir,
and vous allez voir: and Strether has to learn not to understand, but to
see. The novel makes us actually see embodied the whole difference
between Paris and Woollett: it begins when Strether dines with Miss
Gostrey in Chester by the light of pink-shaded candles, her dress cut
low. Ladies in Paris all bare their shoulders, and they may also smoke
(Miss Barrace does). When Strether first meets Marie de Vionnet he
thinks for a moment that she would have passed at Woolett, until he

notices that she wears more gold bangles than he's ever seen a lady wear
at home. It's not, of course, that she isn't a lady, it's just that in
order for her to be one he has to unmake his old idea of what a 'lady'
is, or does, or wears.
The constituents of the love-tangle Strether uncovers aren't
translatable because they don't have equivalents in the English language
world that Strether knows. He has to learn for himself what it means
that Marie de Vionnet is a femme du monde: a woman of the world,
literally, but the English phrase has all the wrong weight in its
implications of a dreary secure knowingness, while a woman of fashion is
too trivial. Monde is an important social marker in this French social
hierarchy: haut monde and beau monde , and hovering somewhere behind the
possibility of the improper demi-mondaine that Woollett had imagined
Chad must be entangled with, indispensible ingredient in the French
novel tradition. At first Strether is ignorant: he thinks a femme du
monde might be equivalent to a lady: a lady who by definition in
Woollett couldn't be having an extra-marital affair with a younger man.
He has to learn to imagine the possibility of a woman of high status not
compromised by her secret, as long as she carries it off. He has to
learn in fact that one of the functions of the femme du monde might even
be the kind of initiation that Marie de Vionnet has given to Chad.
Another untranslatable ingredient in the tangle is Jeanne, the
jeune fille. 'Young girl' doesn't come near what's understood here: a
refined type, product of a very particular training in line with an
evolved aesthetic involving infantilising white dresses and appealing
guilelessness (James's readers know all about the type, from Pansy and
Aggie). Mamie the so-different American girl understands at once, and
with delicate sympathy, that the jeune fille is formed to please: to
please men, of course, the consumers of this particular piece of
brilliant French pleasure-making. Jeanne is a parti, a potential match,
created in order to be desired and thence married. There's even a word
that has to be in French - difficile - for the thing girls might be but
thankfully Jeanne is not: the true jeune fille is compliant and easy (we
see her agree, although she loves Chad, to an arranged marriage).
It is significant that, for all his advancing openness to new ways
of seeing, Strether baulks at this marriage of Jeanne's. She stands,
rather impersonally realised as she is, for some sacrifice buried deep
within Parisian sexual culture, which Strether cannot bear to entertain
nor to lend himself to, not in word or even in imagination. His
relinquishment of the securities and simplicities of Woollett's
moralising condemnation is not a simple of exchange of Woollett values
for Parisian ones: his poise outside both systems makes him aware, as it
were, of the sacrificial elements in each of them. The account he gets
from Maria Gostrey of Marie de Vionnet's own life story affords a
glimpse of the more or less brutal marriage arrangements by which the
jeune fille abruptly commences her transformation into the knowing and
sophisticated adult woman, managing her separation and her affair.
Compared with Americans, foreign women are 'quite made over ... by
marriage', Maria explains.
A whole social process, absolutely different to anything in
Woollett, pivots through all its so different phases on the pleasing of
men. What makes Marie de Vionnet 'wonderful' is this lifelong effort

made to please; she can be fifty women; she can make herself a young
girl of twenty; above all, she must never bore Chad. Sarah Pocock
needn't be afraid of boring anyone, ever (if they're bored that's their
problem). Sarah knows she's right; Marie only knows she's charming. When
Marie at the end of her novel is sure she is going to lose Chad, all she
can fall back upon for help is a language of old wisdom - vieille
sagesse: such things have always been; women have always known. 'It's
when one's old that it's worst: it's a doom...' and 'the only certainty
is I shall be the loser in the end'. 'What woman was ever safe?' Maria
Gostrey asks. This old wisdom moves and scares Strether; it's nothing
like the righteous reasoning he has taken from Mrs. Newsome as the
woman's voice. He reflects that: 'it took women, it took women, if to
deal with them was to walk on water no wonder that the water rose...'
I have two last thoughts about the French words in The
Ambassadors. The first is to note that the one place where we hear
explicitly that Marie de Vionnet chooses to speak to Strether in an
idiomatic rapid French he can only lamely follow is after the encounter
on the river. And we know through this as well as through other things
that we have penetrated here to the deepest Frenchest place in the
novel, where the agrment of the river suggests a world of other
agrments , and where English in a sense has to stop on the threshold.
And, a postscript: when Chad is making up his mind to go back to
America, he's going to go into advertising, and he puts that in French
to Strether: c'est un monde. Is this the lesson that Chad has taken from
the French culture of pleasurable consumption: that he should be able to
sell it to someone?

_ Witness of Poetry, p.6.

Hadley, Tessa Jane. "French Words in The Ambassadors." [The Ambassadors 1903].
Henry James Society.