by Henry James
“The man without a country. He’ll pass you in—that’s what your sister wants.”
“You oughtn’t to abuse him, because it was you that presented him,” the girl rejoined.
“I never presented him! I’d like to kick him.”
“We should never have seen him if it hadn’t been for you.”
“That’s a fact, but it doesn’t make me love him any the better. He’s the poorest kind there is.”
“I don’t care anything about his kind.”
“That’s a pity, if you’re going to marry him. How could I know that when I took you up there?”
“Good-bye, Mr. Flack,” said Francie, trying to gain ground from him.
This attempt was of course vain, and after a moment he resumed: “Will you keep me as a friend?”
“Why, Mr. Flack, of course I will!” cried Francie.
“All right,” he replied; and they presently rejoined their companions.
V
GASTON PROBERT MADE HIS PLAN, IMPARTING IT to no one but his friend Waterlow, whose help indeed he needed to carry it out. These confidences cost him something, for the clever young painter found his predicament amusing and made no scruple of showing it. Probert was too much in love, however, to be discountenanced by sarcasm. This fact is the more noteworthy as he knew that Waterlow scoffed at him for a purpose—had a theory that that kind of treatment would be salutary. The French taste was in Waterlow’s “manner,” but it had not yet coloured his view of the relations of a young man of spirit with parents and pastors. He was Gallic to the tip of his finest brush, but the humour of his early American education could not fail to obtrude itself in discussion with a friend in whose life the principle of authority played so large a part. He accused Probert of being afraid of his sisters, which was a crude way (and he knew it) of alluding to the rigidity of the conception of the family among people who had adopted and had even to Waterlow’s sense, as the phrase is, improved upon the usages of France. That did injustice (and this the artist also knew), to the delicate nature of the bond which united the different members of the house of Probert, who were each for all and all for each. Family feeling among them was not a tyranny but a religion, and in regard to Mesdames de Brécourt, de Cliché and de Douves what Gaston was most afraid of was seeming to them not to love them. None the less Charles Waterlow, who thought he had charming parts, held that the best way had not been taken to make a man of him, and the spirit in which the painter sometimes endeavoured to repair this mishap was altogether benevolent, though the form was frequently rough. Waterlow combined in an odd manner many of the forms of the Parisian studio with the moral and social ideas of Brooklyn, Long Island, where his first seeds had been implanted.
Gaston Probert desired nothing better than to be a man; what bothered him (and it is perhaps a proof that his instinct was gravely at fault), was a certain vagueness as to the constituents of this personage. He should be made more nearly, as it seemed to him, a brute were he to sacrifice in such an effort the decencies and pieties—holy things all of them—in which he had been reared. It was very well for Waterlow to say that to be a genuine man it was necessary to be a little of a brute; his friend was willing, in theory, to assent even to that. The difficulty was in application, in practice—as to which the painter declared that all that would be simple enough if it only didn’t take so much account of the marchioness, the countess and—what was the other one?—the duchess. These young amenities were exchanged between the pair (while Gaston explained, almost as eagerly as if he were scoring a point, that the other one was only a baronne), during that brief journey to Spain of which mention has already been made, during the later weeks of the summer, after their return (the young men spent a fortnight together on the coast of Brittany), and above all during the autumn, when they were settled in Paris for the winter, when Mr. Dosson had reappeared, according to the engagement with his daughters, when the sittings for the portrait had multiplied (the painter was unscrupulous as to the number he demanded), and the work itself, born under a happy star, took on more and more the aspect of a masterpiece. It was at Grenada that Gaston really broke out; there, one balmy night, he communicated to his companion that he would marry Francina Dosson or would never marry any one. The declaration was the more striking as it came after an interval; many days had elapsed since their separation from the young lady and many new and beautiful objects had engaged their attention. It appeared that poor Probert had been thinking of her all the while, and he let his friend know that it was that dinner at Saint Germain that had finished him. What she had been there Waterlow himself had seen: he would not controvert the proposition that she had been irresistible.
In November, in Paris (it was months and weeks before the artist began to please himself), the enamoured youth came very often to the Avenue de Villiers, toward the end of a sitting; and until it was finished, not to disturb the lovely model, he cultivated conversation with the elder sister: Gaston Probert was capable of that. Delia was always there of course, but Mr. Dosson had not once turned up and the newspaper man happily appeared to have taken himself off. The new aspirant learned in fact from Miss Dosson that a crisis in the affairs of his journal had recalled him to the seat of that publication. When the young ladies had gone (and when he did not go with them—he accompanied them not rarely), the visitor was almost lyrical in his appreciation of his friend’s work; he had no jealousy of the insight which enabled him to reconstitute the girl on canvas with that perfection. He knew that Waterlow painted her too well to be in love with her and that if he himself could have attacked her in that fashion he would not have wanted to marry her. She bloomed there, on the easel, as brightly as in life, and the artist had caught the sweet essence of her beauty. It was exactly the way in which her lover would have chosen that she should be represented, and yet it had required a perfectly independent hand. Gaston Probert mused on this mystery and somehow felt proud of the picture and responsible for it, though it was as little his property, as yet, as the young lady herself.
When, in December, he told Waterlow of his plan of campaign the latter said, “I will do anything in the world you like—anything you think will help you—but it passes me, my dear fellow why in the world you don’t go to them and say, ‘I’ve seen a girl who is as good as cake and pretty as fire, she exactly suits me, I’ve taken time to think of it and I know what I want: therefore I propose to make her my wife. If you happen to like her so much the better; if you don’t be so good as to keep it to yourselves.’ That is much the most excellent way. Why, gracious heaven, all these mysteries and machinations?”
“Oh, you don’t understand, you don’t understand!” sighed Gaston Probert, with many wrinkles on his brow. “One can’t break with one’s traditions in an hour, especially when there is so much in them that one likes. I shall not love her more if they like her, but I shall love them more, and I care about that. You talk as a man who has nothing to consider. I have everything to consider—and I am glad I have. My pleasure in marrying her will be double if my father and my sisters accept her, and I shall greatly enjoy working out the business of bringing them round.”
There were moments when Charles Waterlow resented the very terminology of his friend: he hated to hear a man talk about the woman he loved being “accepted.” If one accepted her one’s self or, rather, were accepted by her, that ended the matter, and the effort to bring round those who gave her the cold shoulder was scarcely consistent with self-respect. Probert explained that of course he knew his relatives would only have to know Francina to like her, to delight in her; but that to know her they would first have to make her acquaintance. This was the delicate point, for social commerce with such people as Mr. Dosson and Delia was not in the least in their usual line and it was impossible to disconnect the poor girl from her appendages. Therefore the whole question must be approached by an oblique movement; it would never do to march straight up to it. The wedge should have a narrow end and Gaston was ready to declare that he had f
ound it. His sister Susan was another name for it; he would break her in first and she would help him to break in the others. She was his favourite relation, his intimate friend—the most modern, the most Parisian and inflammable member of the family, She was not reasonable but she was perceptive; she had imagination and humour and was capable of generosity and enthusiasm and even of infatuation. She had had her own infatuations and ought to allow for those of others. She would not like the Dossons superficially any better than his father or than Margaret or Jane (he called these ladies by their English names, but for themselves, their husbands, their friends and each other they were Suzanne, Marguerite and Jeanne); but there was a considerable chance that he might induce her to take his point of view. She was as fond of beauty and of the arts as he was; this was one of their bonds of union. She appreciated highly Charles Waterlow’s talent and there had been a good deal of talk about his painting her portrait. It is true her husband viewed the project with so much colder an eye that it had not been carried out.
According to Gaston’s plan she was to come to the Avenue de Villiers to see what the artist had done for Miss Francie; her brother was to have stimulated her curiosity by his rhapsodies, in advance, rhapsodies bearing wholly upon the work itself, the example of Waterlow’s powers, and not upon the young lady, whom he was not to let her know at first that he had so much as seen. Just at the last, just before her visit, he was to tell her that he had met the girl (at the studio), and that she was as remarkable in her way as the picture. Seeing the picture and hearing this, Mme. de Brécourt, as a disinterested lover of charming impressions, would express a desire also to enjoy a sight of so rare a creature; upon which Waterlow was to say that that would be easy if she would come in some day when Miss Francie was sitting. He would give her two or three dates and Gaston would see that she didn’t let the opportunity pass. She would return alone (this time he wouldn’t go with her), and she would be as much struck as he hoped. Everything depended on that, but it couldn’t fail. The girl would have to captivate her, but the girl could be trusted, especially if she didn’t know who the demonstrative French lady was, with her fine plain face, her hair so flaxen as to be nearly white, her vividly red lips and protuberant, light-coloured eyes. Waterlow was to do no introducing and to reveal the visitor’s identity only after she had gone. This was a charge he grumbled at; he called the whole business an odious comedy, but his friend knew that if he undertook it he would acquit himself honourably. After Mme. de Brécourt had been captivated (the question of whether Francie would be so received in advance no consideration), her brother would throw off the mask and convince her that she must now work with him. Another meeting would be arranged for her with the girl (in which each would appear in her proper character), and in short the plot would thicken.
Gaston Probert’s forecast of his difficulties revealed a considerable faculty for analysis, but that was not rare enough in the French composition of things to make his friend stare. He brought Suzanne de Brécourt, she was enchanted with the portrait of the little American, and the rest of the drama began to follow in its order. Mme. de Brécourt raved, to Waterlow’s face (she had no opinions behind people’s backs), about his mastery of his craft; she could say flattering things to a man with an assurance altogether her own. She was the reverse of egotistic and never spoke of herself; her success in life sprang from a much cleverer selection of her pronouns. Waterlow, who liked her and wanted to paint her ugliness (it was so charming, as he would make it), had two opinions about her—one of which was that she knew a hundred times less than she thought (and even than her brother thought), of what she talked about; and the other that she was after all not such a humbug as she seemed. She passed in her family for a rank radical, a bold Bohemian; she picked up expressions out of newspapers, but her hands and feet were celebrated, and her behaviour was not. That of her sisters, as well, had never been effectively exposed.
“But she must be charming, your young lady,” she said to Gaston, while she turned her head this way and that as she stood before Francie’s image. “She looks like a piece of sculpture—or something cast in silver—of the time of Francis the First; something of Jean Goujon or Germain Pilon.” The young men exchanged a glance, for this happened to be a capital comparison, and Gaston replied, in a detached way, that she was well worth seeing.
He went in to have a cup of tea with his sister on the day he knew she would have paid her second visit to the studio, and the first words she greeted him with were—“But she is admirable—votre petite—admirable, admirable!” There was a lady calling in the Place Beauvau at the moment—old Mme. d’Outreville, and she naturally asked who was the object of such enthusiasm. Gaston suffered Susan to answer this question; he wanted to hear what she would say. She described the girl almost as well as he would have done, from the point of view of the plastic, with a hundred technical and critical terms, and the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather coldly, as if she thought such talk a good deal of a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held that a young lady was sufficiently catalogued when it was said that she had a dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est que cette merveille?” she inquired; to which Mme. de Brécourt replied that it was a little American whom her brother had dug up. “And what do you propose to do with her, may one ask?” Mme. d’Outreville demanded, looking at Gaston Probert with an eye which seemed to read his secret, so that for half a minute he was on the point of breaking out: “I propose to marry her—there!” But he contained himself, only mentioning for the present that he aspired to ascertain to what uses she was adapted; meanwhile, he added, he expected to look at her a good deal, in the measure in which she would allow him. “Ah, that may take you far!” the old lady exclaimed, as she got up to go; and Gaston glanced at his sister, to see if this idea struck her too. But she appeared almost provokingly exempt from alarm: if she had been suspicious it would have been easier to make his confession. When he came back from accompanying Mme. d’Outreville to her carriage he asked her if the girl at the studio had known who she was and if she had been frightened. Mme. de Brécourt stared; she evidently thought that kind of sensibility implied an initiation which a little American, accidentally encountered, could not possibly have. “Why should she be frightened? She wouldn’t be even if she had known who I was; much less therefore when I was nothing for her.”
“Oh, you were not nothing for her!” Gaston declared; and when his sister rejoined that he was too amiable he brought out his revelation. He had seen the young lady more often than he had told her; he had particularly wished that she should see her. Now he wanted his father and Jane and Margaret to do the same, and above all he wanted them to like her, even as she, Susan, liked her. He was delighted that she had been captivated—he had been captivated himself. Mme. de Brécourt protested that she had reserved her independence of judgment, and he answered that if she had thought Miss Dosson repulsive she might have expressed it in another way. When she inquired what he was talking about and what he wanted them all to do with her, he said: “I want you to treat her kindly, tenderly, for such as you see her I am thinking of making her my wife.”
“Mercy on us—you haven’t asked her?” cried Mme. de Brécourt.
“No, but I have asked her sister what she would say, and she tells me there would be no difficulty.”
“Her sister?—the little woman with the big head?”
“Her head is rather out of drawing, but it isn’t a part of the affair. She is very inoffensive and she would be devoted to me.”
“For heaven’s sake then keep quiet. She is as common as a dressmaker’s bill.”
“Not when you know her. Besides, that has nothing to do with Francie. You couldn’t find words enough a moment ago to say that Francie is exquisite, and now you will be so good as to stick to that. Come, be intelligent!”
“Do you call her by her little name, like that?” Mme. de Brécourt asked, giving him ano
ther cup of tea.
“Only to you. She is perfectly simple. It is impossible to imagine anything better. And think of the delight of having that charming object before one’s eyes—always, always! It makes a different thing of the future.”
“My poor child,” said Mme. de Brécourt, “you can’t pick up a wife like that—the first little American that comes along. You know I hoped you wouldn’t marry at all—what a pity I think it—for a man. At any rate, if you expect us to like Miss—what’s her name?—Miss Fancy, all I can say is we won’t. We can’t!”
“I shall marry her then without your approbation.”
“Very good. But if she deprives you of that (you have always had it, you are used to it, it’s a part of your life), you will hate her at the end of a month.”
“I don’t care. I shall have had my month.”
“And she—poor thing?”
“Poor thing, exactly! You will begin to pity her, and that will make you cultivate her, and that will make you find how adorable she is. Then you’ll like her, then you’ll love her, then you’ll see how discriminating I have been, and we shall all be happy together again.”
“But how can you possibly know, with such people, what you have got hold of?”
“By having the sense of delicate things. You pretend to have it, and yet in such a case as this you try to be stupid. Give that up; you might as well first as last, for the girl’s an irresistible fact and it will be better to accept her than to let her accept you.”
Gaston’s sister asked him if Miss Dosson had a fortune, and he said he knew nothing about that. Her father apparently was rich, but he didn’t mean to ask for a penny with her. American fortunes moreover were the last things to count upon; they had seen too many examples of that. “Papa will never listen to that,” Mme. de Brécourt replied.
“Listen to what?”