The Aspern Papers
1
ELECBOOK CLASSICS
The Aspern
Papers
Henry James
Henry James
Elecbook Classics
The Aspern Papers
2
ELECBOOK CLASSICS
ebc0225, asprn10.pdf. Henry James: The Aspern Papers
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The Aspern Papers
Henry James
Henry James
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The Aspern Papers
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Contents
Click on number to go to page
Project Gutenberg Etexts.................................................................................5
Contents ........................................................................................................11
I .....................................................................................................................12
II ....................................................................................................................21
III...................................................................................................................29
IV ..................................................................................................................39
V....................................................................................................................49
VI ..................................................................................................................62
VII .................................................................................................................78
VIII................................................................................................................90
IX ................................................................................................................103
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I
had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I should
have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business
dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the short cut,
who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the nature of women
to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view—I mean of a
practical scheme; but it has struck me that they sometimes throw off a bold
conception—such as a man would not have risen to—with singular serenity.
“Simply ask them to take you in on the footing of a lodger”—I don’t think
that unaided I should have risen to that. I was beating about the bush, trying
to be ingenious, wondering by what combination of arts I might become an
acquaintance, when she offered this happy suggestion that the way to
become an acquaintance was first to become an inmate. Her actual
knowledge of the Misses Bordereau was scarcely larger than mine, and
indeed I had brought with me from England some definite facts which were
new to her. Their name had been mixed up ages before with one of the
greatest names of the century, and they lived now in Venice in obscurity, on
very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on
an out-of-the-way canal: this was the substance of my friend’s impression of
them. She herself had been established in Venice for fifteen years and had
done a great deal of good there; but the circle of her benevolence did not
include the two shy, mysterious and, as it was somehow supposed, scarcely
respectable Americans (they were believed to have lost in their long exile all
national quality, besides having had, as their name implied, some French
strain in their origin), who asked no favors and desired no attention. In the
early years of her residence she had made an attempt to see them, but this
had been successful only as regards the little one, as Mrs. Prest called the
I
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niece; though in reality as I afterward learned she was considerably the
bigger of the two. She had heard Miss Bordereau was ill and had a suspicion
that she was in want; and she had gone to the house to offer assistance, so
that if there were suffering (and American suffering), she should at least not
have it on her conscience. The “little one” received her in the great cold,
tarnished Venetian sala, the central hall of the house, paved with marble and
roofed with dim crossbeams, and did not even ask her to sit down. This was
not encouraging for me, who wished to sit so fast, and I remarked as much to
Mrs. Prest. She however replied with profundity, “Ah, but there’s all the
difference: I went to confer a favor and you will go to ask one. If they are
proud you will be on the right side.” And she offered to show me their house
to begin with—to row me thither in her gondola. I let her know that I had
already been to look at it half a dozen times; but I accepted her invitation, for
it charmed me to hover about the place. I had made my way to it the day
after my arrival in Venice (it had been described to me in advance by the
friend in England to whom I owed definite information as to their possession
of the papers), and I had besieged it with my eyes while I considered my
plan of campaign. Jeffrey Aspern had never been in it that I knew of; but
some note of his voice seemed to abide there by a roundabout implication, a
faint reverberation.
Mrs. Prest knew nothing about the papers, but she was interested in my
curiosity, as she was always interested in the joys and sorrows of her friends.
As we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the sociable hood
with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by the movable
window, I could see that she was amused by my infatuation, the way my
interest in the papers had become a fixed idea. “One would think you
expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the universe,” she said;
and I denied the impeachment only by replying that if I had to choose
between that precious solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters I
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knew indeed which would appear to me the greater boon. She pretended to
make light of his genius, and I took no pains to defend him. One doesn’t
defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense. Besides, today, after his
long comparative obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature,
for all the world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most
I said was that he was no doubt not a woman’s poet: to which she rejoined
aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau’s. The strange thing
had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive: it was as if I
had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or the famous Lady
Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a generation as extinct.
“Why, she must be tremendously old—at least a hundred,” I had said; but on
coming to consider dates I saw that it was not strictly necessary that she
should have exceeded by very much the common span. Nonetheless she was
very far advanced in life, and her relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred
in her early womanhood. “That is her excuse,” said Mrs. Prest, halfsententiously and yet also somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a
speech so little in the real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse
for having loved the divine poet! He had been not only one of the most
brilliant minds of his day—and in those years, when the century was young,
there were, as everyone knows, many—but one of the most genial men and
one of the handsomest.
The niece, according to Mrs. Prest, was not so old, and she risked the
conjecture that she was only a grandniece. This was possible; I had nothing
but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English fellow worshipper
John Cumnor, who had never seen the couple. The world, as I say, had
recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognized him most. The
multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but of that temple he and I regarded
ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly, as I think, that we had done more
for his memory than anyone else, and we had done it by opening lights into
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his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from
the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in
establishing. His early death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless
the papers in Miss Bordereau’s hands should perversely bring out others.
There had been an impression about 1825 that he had “treated her badly,”
just as there had been an impression that he had “served,” as the London
populace says, several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases
Cumnor and I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit
him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more
indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me that no
man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances. These were
almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had
flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious fashion many
complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise. He was not a
woman’s poet, as I had said to Mrs. Prest, in the modern phase of his
reputation; but the situation had been different when the man’s own voice
was mingled with his song. That voice, by every testimony, was one of the
sweetest ever heard. “Orpheus and the Maenads!” was the exclamation that
rose to my lips when I first turned over his correspondence. Almost all the
Maenads were unreasonable, and many of them insupportable; it struck me
in short that he was kinder, more considerate than, in his place—if I could
imagine myself in such a place!—I should have been.
It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not take up
space with attempting to explain it, that whereas in all these other lines of
research we had to deal with phantoms and dust, the mere echoes of echoes,
the one living source of information that had lingered on into our time had
been unheeded by us. Every one of Aspern’s contemporaries had, according
to our belief, passed away; we had not been able to look into a single pair of
eyes into which his had looked or to feel a transmitted contact in any aged
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16
hand that his had touched. Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear,
and yet she alone had survived. We exhausted in the course of months our
wonder that we had not found her out sooner, and the substance of our
explanation was that she had kept so quiet. The poor lady on the whole had
had reason for doing so. But it was a revelation to us that it was possible to
keep so quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century—the age of
newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers. And she had
taken no great trouble about it either: she had not hidden herself away in an
undiscoverable hole; she had boldly settled down in a city of exhibition. The
only secret of her safety that we could perceive was that Venice contained so
many curiosities that were greater than she. And then accident had somehow
favored her, as was shown for example in the fact that Mrs. Prest had never
happened to mention her to me, though I had spent three weeks in Venice—
under her nose, as it were—five years before. Mrs. Prest had not mentioned
this much to anyone; she appeared almost to have forgotten she was there.
Of course she had not the responsibilities of an editor. It was no explanation
of the old woman’s having eluded us to say that she lived abroad, for our
researches had again and again taken us—not only by correspondence but by
personal inquiry—to France, to Germany, to Italy, in which countries, not
counting his important stay in England, so many of the too few years of
Aspern’s career were spent. We were glad to think at least that in all our
publishings—some people consider I believe that we have overdone them—
we had only touched in passing and in the most discreet manner on Miss
Bordereau’s connection. Oddly enough, even if we had had the material—
and we often wondered what had become of it—it would have been the most
difficult episode to handle.
The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the class
which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified name.
“How charming! It’s gray and pink!” my companion exclaimed; and that is
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the most comprehensive description of it. It was not particularly old, only
two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet
discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career. But its wide front, with
a stone balcony from end to end of the piano nobile or most important floor,
was architectural enough, with the aid of various pilasters and arches; and
the stucco with which in the intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy
in the April afternoon. It overlooked a clean, melancholy, unfrequented
canal, which had a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side. “I don’t
know why—there are no brick gables,” said Mrs. Prest, “but this corner has
seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than
like Venice. It’s perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can
pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a
Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I
daresay they have the reputation of witches.”
I forget what answer I made to this—I was given up to two other
reflections. The first of these was that if the old lady lived in such a big,
imposing house she could not be in any sort of misery and therefore would
not be tempted by a chance to let a couple of rooms. I expressed this idea to
Mrs. Prest, who gave me a very logical reply. “If she didn’t live in a big
house how could it be a question of her having rooms to spare? If she were
not amply lodged herself you would lack ground to approach her. Besides, a
big house here, and especially in this quartier perdû, proves nothing at all: it
is perfectly compatible with a state of penury. Dilapidated old palazzi, if you
will go out of the way for them, are to be had for five shillings a year. And
as for the people who live in them—no, until you have explored Venice
socially as much as I have you can form no idea of their domestic desolation.
They live on nothing, for they have nothing to live on.” The other idea that
had come into my head was connected with a high blank wall which
appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank I
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call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired
breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with
time; and a few thin trees, with the poles of certain rickety trellises, were
visible over the top. The place was a garden, and apparently it belonged to
the house. It suddenly occurred to me that if it did belong to the house I had
my pretext.
I sat looking out on all this with Mrs. Prest (it was covered with the
golden glow of Venice) from the shade of our felze, and she asked me if I
would go in then, while she waited for me, or come back another time. At
first I could not decide—it was doubtless very weak of me. I wanted still to
think I might get a footing, and I was afraid to meet failure, for it would
leave me, as I remarked to my companion, without another arrow for my
bow. “Why not another?” she inquired as I sat there hesitating and thinking
it over; and she wished to know why even now and before taking the trouble
of becoming an inmate (which might be wretchedly uncomfortable after all,
even if it succeeded), I had not the resource of simply offering them a sum of
money down. In that way I might obtain the documents without bad nights.
“Dearest lady,” I exclaimed, “excuse the impatience of my tone when I
suggest that you must have forgotten the very fact—surely I communicated
it to you—which pushed me to throw myself upon your ingenuity. The old
woman won’t have the documents spoken of; they are personal, delicate,
intimate, and she hasn’t modern notions, God bless her! If I should sound
that note first I should certainly spoil the game. I can arrive at the papers
only by putting her off her guard, and I can put her off her guard only by
ingratiating diplomatic practices. Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I
am sorry for it, but for Jeffrey Aspern’s sake I would do worse still. First I
must take tea with her; then tackle the main job.” And I told over what had
happened to John Cumnor when he wrote to her. No notice whatever had
been taken of his first letter, and the second had been answered very sharply,
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The Aspern Papers
19
in six lines, by the niece. “Miss Bordereau requested her to say that she
could not imagine what he meant by troubling them. They had none of Mr.
Aspern’s papers, and if they had had wouldn’t have dreamed of showing
them to anyone on any account whatever. She didn’t know what he was
talking about and begged he would let her alone.” I certainly did not want to
be met that way.
“Well,” said Mrs. Prest after a moment, provokingly, “perhaps after all
they haven’t any of his things. If they deny it flat how are you sure?”
“John Cumnor is sure, and it would take me long to tell you how his
conviction, or his very strong presumption—strong enough to stand against
the old lady’s not unnatural fib—has built itself up. Besides, he makes much
of the internal evidence of the niece’s letter.”
“The internal evidence?”
“Her calling him ‘Mr. Aspern.’”
“I don’t see what that proves.”
“It proves familiarity, and familiarity implies the possession of
mementoes, or relics. I can’t tell you how that ‘Mr.’ touches me—how it
bridges over the gulf of time and brings our hero near to me—nor what an
edge it gives to my desire to see Juliana. You don’t say, ‘Mr.’ Shakespeare.”
“Would I, any more, if I had a box full of his letters?”
“Yes, if he had been your lover and someone wanted them!” And I added
that John Cumnor was so convinced, and so all the more convinced by Miss
Bordereau’s tone, that he would have come himself to Venice on the
business were it not that for him there was the obstacle that it would be
difficult to disprove his identity with the person who had written to them,
which the old ladies would be sure to suspect in spite of dissimulation and a
change of name. If they were to ask him point-blank if he were not their
correspondent it would be too awkward for him to lie; whereas I was
fortunately not tied in that way. I was a fresh hand and could say no without
Henry James
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