Henry’s entrée into the citadel of Parisian literary society was to be a fellow foreigner, the great Russian author Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, whose books Henry had read in French and German translations and whom he deemed quite possibly “the first novelist of the day.” Two years earlier, on a previous European junket, Henry had written a laudatory essay on Turgenev’s fiction for The North American Review, praising the Russian’s work for its “commingled realism and idealism” and admiring how, in Turgenev’s hands, “abstract possibilities immediately become, to his vision, concrete situations.” By way of realizing his own abstract possibility of one day meeting his admired subject in the flesh, Henry had mailed a copy of his belletristic mash note to Turgenev in Baden-Baden, following up a few weeks later with a visit in person to the posh spa town—only to discover by the time he arrived that the cosmopolitan author had already decamped for Carlsbad to recover from an attack of gout. Turgenev did, however, answer Henry by post, noting that his review was “inspired by a fine sense of what is just and true,” adding that “there is manliness in it and psychological sagacity and a clear literary taste.” The Russian gave Henry his Paris address in the rue de Douai and concluded, “It would please me very much indeed to make your acquaintance as well as that of your compatriots.”
Now, having settled into his cozy Right Bank flat, Henry wasted little time in redeeming his two-year-old rain check with the Russian literary giant. Number 50, rue de Douai, perched along one of the steep winding streets of Montmartre, was a three-story maison particulière set back from the sidewalk behind a low stone wall. There Turgenev cohabited in a long-standing ménage à trois with the French-Spanish operatic prima donna Pauline Garcia-Viardot and her considerably older husband, the French writer Louis Viardot—a scandalous domestic arrangement dating back to their 1843 meeting in St. Petersburg, when the acclaimed soprano was only twenty-one. When Henry arrived chez Turgenev promptly at eleven on the appointed morning, Ivan Sergeyevich greeted his transatlantic visitor warmly and ushered him up into the small sitting room on the second floor. For a novelist’s lair, the room struck Henry as surprisingly spare and neat, with only a few books and not a scrap of paper or a writing implement in sight, as if “the traces of work had been carefully removed.” Other than “several choice pictures of the modern French school, especially a very fine specimen of prime canvas of Théodore Rousseau,” the entire chamber—from the walls to the furniture to the portière—was decorated in various shades of green. The centerpiece of the room was an “immeasurable” divan—also in green—that appeared to have been specially constructed to accommodate Turgenev’s enormous frame; the Russian writer proved to be not only a literary giant but a literal one as well. As Henry later described his host:
It would have been impossible to imagine a better representation of a Nimrod of the North. He was exceedingly tall, and broad and robust in proportion. His head was one of the finest, and though the line of his features was irregular there was a great deal of beauty in his face. It was eminently of the Russian type—almost everything in it was wide. His expression had a singular sweetness, with a touch of Slav languor, and his eye, the kindest of eyes, was deep and melancholy. His hair, abundant and straight, was as white as silver; and his beard, which he wore trimmed rather short, was of the colour of his hair. In all his tall person…there was an air of neglected strength, as if it had been part of his modesty never to remind himself that he was strong.
The Russian proved as powerful conversationally as he appeared physically. Over the course of the next two hours, Henry found his host to be “the richest, the most delightful, of talkers” as the Stendhal of the Steppes shared with his guest some of the secrets of his method of composition, in which, to Henry’s immense approval, character—character expressed, character exposed—always came before story. It was his habit, Turgenev revealed, to begin each new work by compiling a detailed dossier on the personages he wished to present, much as a detective might put together a description of the physique, psychology, habits, and social background of his prime criminal suspects. (Here Henry, who, so far as he knew, still had a price on his head, began flushing uncontrollably—a notably peculiar response to a bit of literary chitchat, which the baffled Russian courteously disregarded.) James found Turgenev “a delightful, mild, masculine figure.” According to Leon Edel: “Henry had come prepared to like him for his novels. Instead he found a human being he could love.”
But the ambitious American was out for even bigger game: He confided to his newfound friend his desire to make the acquaintance of the most eminent fellow practitioners of their art in France, most especially the illustrious Gustave Flaubert, of whom he knew Turgenev to be an intimate. To Henry’s unutterable delight, his host offered to take him to the upcoming réunion of Flaubert’s celebrated cénacle, his weekly gathering of the brightest literary lights on the Parisian scene.
Among the world’s great novelists the author of Madame Bovary occupied a unique niche in James’s literary pantheon. Henry’s unabashed veneration of Flaubert was born of an indelible incident from his European youth: While staying in Paris with his family in 1856, he had happened upon a copy of the Revue de Paris on a table in his father’s study. Flipping through the pages of that distinctive yellow-bound periodical, the adolescent author-to-be was drawn to the title Madame Bovary: Moeurs de Province, which struck him as “mysteriously arresting, inscrutably charged.” For the rest of his life, he would be able to evoke with striking clarity the image of his juvenile self standing before the fire, his back against “the low beplushed and be-garnished French chimney-piece” as he greedily devoured the excerpt, knowing nothing of what had preceded it nor of what was to follow, but thoroughly entranced by the vibrant world Flaubert had conjured up on the pages before him. For Henry, as his biographer Robert LeClair described it, the experience had proved “little short of historic,” establishing as it did the literary benchmark against which the fledgling writer would measure his own productions for decades to come. Describing Flaubert’s masterpiece years later, he would enthuse that “the accumulation of detail is so immense, the vividness of portraiture of people, of things, of places, of times and hours, is so poignant and convincing, that one is dragged into the very current and tissue of the story; the reader seems to have lived in it all, more than in any novel I can recall.”
In Flaubert, Henry had discovered “the novelist’s novelist.” He was particularly admiring of the exacting attention paid by the Frenchman—who, rumor had it, had once spent three full days polishing a single sentence—to producing “perfect phrases, perfectly interrelated, and as closely woven together as a suit of chain-mail.” Flaubert, as he later wrote, was “the model for us all.”
It was thus with considerable awe and no small measure of trepidation that Henry set out with Turgenev the following weekend to participate in one of Flaubert’s famous “Sunday afternoons.” Scrambling after the huge Russian up five long flights of stairs to Flaubert’s Parisian roost at the end of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Henry doubtless would gladly have endured all the dangers, discomforts, and indignities of the previous months a thousand times over if such were the price of being brought to this giddy pinnacle.
Gustave Flaubert himself came to the door and embraced Turgenev as if greeting a long-lost brother. The great French author was wearing “a long colloquial dressing gown” with matching trousers, an outfit that served only to accentuate his “massive physical development.” He was largely bald, with his sparse allotment of hair falling in a shaggy mane over the back of his collar. His eyes were pale and “salient,” his complexion ruddy and splotchy, his long leonine mustaches swept back along the sides of his prominent jowls. His most striking physical trait was his sheer size: Contemporary observers invariably likened the impression he created to that of a bear or an ox; but to Henry James, the big Frenchman resembled rather a “weather-beaten old military man,” calling to his mind nothing so much as an aged Gallic incarnation of
Cole Younger.
Flaubert welcomed his guests into a narrow, high-ceilinged salon that Henry found “bare and provisional” in its furnishings, with the striking exception of a great gilded statue of the Buddha gazing down beatifically over the proceedings from its perch of honor on the mantelpiece. For all his girth and forbidding fierceness of mien, Henry’s host turned out to be surprisingly gentle and soft-spoken, even timid, as he introduced his transatlantic visitor to the others on hand that afternoon. Among these notables were Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Émile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant—a veritable who’s who of contemporary French realism. And in refreshing contrast to the discourse of Henry’s erstwhile colleagues—which had been largely confined to “guns, whores, and horses”—the talk in Flaubert’s salon gave the young novelist the intoxicating sense of experiencing genuine conversation for the first time in his life. “What was discussed in that little smoke-clouded room,” he later recorded, “was chiefly questions of taste, questions of art and form; and the speakers, for the most part, were in aesthetic matters, radicals of the deepest dye,” by which he meant that they shared “the conviction that art and morality are two perfectly different things, and that the former has no more to do with the latter than it has with astronomy or embryology.” The only duty of a novel, in the credo of Flaubert’s coterie, “was to be well written; that merit included every other of which it was capable.”
The afternoon went by in a heady haze of thick smoke and brilliant talk. Though Henry spoke less than the others—in deference to their seniority in the clique and their daunting virtuosity with the French tongue—he felt that he acquitted himself admirably, an impression that was confirmed at the end of the day when his host effusively invited him to return the following Sunday. Later, in his journal, Henry described Flaubert as having “a powerful, serious, melancholy, manly, deeply corrupted, yet not corrupting nature.” As Leon Edel wrote, “He liked the man; he was not at all what his books had led him to suspect; and there were moments when he was to wonder whether he wasn’t fonder of Flaubert than of Turgenev.”
Henry could not help but dwell on the similarities he saw between himself and his literary hero: Both were votaries at the altar of le mot juste. (“We believe,” Henry wrote, “there is a certain particular phrase, better than any other, for everything in the world, and the thoroughly accomplished writer ends by finding it.”) On a more personal level, neither author had ever married, both had briefly attended law school in youth, and both were subject to frequent bouts of ill health—in Flaubert’s case, periodic attacks of epilepsy, among other ailments. But there the similarities abruptly ended; for while the American was a fastidious virgin who prided himself on propriety, refinement, and the keeping of a high moral tone in both his life and work, the Frenchman was a notorious débauché who wallowed in gluttony, absinthe, alcohol, tobacco, and fornication. On their way home, Turgenev confided to his new American friend his conviction that the trouble with Flaubert was that he had never known a decent woman, or even one that was a little interesting, having passed his life exclusively “avec des courtisanes et des riens-du-tout”—an endless, fruitless series of infatuations and dalliances with prostitutes and actresses—Rachel Félix, Marie Dorval, Apollonie Sabatier, Alice Pasca, Béatrix Person, and Sarah Bernhardt, among countless others.
This juicy tidbit of Parisian literary gossip was, for Henry, the cherry on the pudding. Only a month earlier, he had been dodging bullets, coated in his own diarrhea; now here he was, dishing on the author of Madame Bovary with the first novelist of the day. Back in his cozy apartment that evening, he stretched out blissfully on the plush chaise longue in his parlor with a glass of port to let the splendid impressions of the afternoon wash over him and percolate in his consciousness. At last the sweet potentialities of his new life in the French capital promised to eclipse the sordid memories of Missouri and Minnesota as he picked up the thread of his artistic destiny among his true peers. He felt that he had taken a seat in the council of the gods. “Je suis lancé en plein Olympe,” he wrote a few days later to his old boyhood friend Thomas Sergeant Perry.
But Henry James, who once called Europe “the great American sedative,” was about to find the old continent anything but tranquilizing: His euphoric musings were abruptly intruded upon by the appearance at the parlor door of his stalwart portier, who discreetly knocked, entered the chamber, and handed his employer a note announcing the recent arrival in Paris of his sister, Alice, and her traveling companion, a young lady by the name of Miss Elena Hite.
That very evening, on the other side of the Atlantic, William James was delivering a public lecture at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. His talk was entitled “Foundations for a Scientific Psychology,” the topic closest to his professional heart that autumn and one that was intimately bound up with his hopes to establish a laboratory of experimental psychology at the university.
“We now believe that the uniform correlation of brain-states and mind-states is a law of nature,” Professor James informed his audience, explaining that the emergence of psychology from the ethereal realms of metaphysics and into the empirical rigors of the laboratory was largely the result of its recent alliance with the science of physiology, a field in which new discoveries about the functionings of the central nervous system were promising to shed fascinating fresh light on the ancient mysteries of perception, emotion, cognition, memory, attention, and will.
Among William’s listeners on this occasion was President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard; Louis Agassiz’s son, Alexander, who was running the museum that his late naturalist father, Louis, had founded; and of course, William’s faithful new cheerleader and amanuensis Alice Gibbens, who had labored with him for weeks in preparing his address and with whom he had rehearsed it ad nauseam all that afternoon. Front and center in the crowd sat Asa Hite of Hartford, whom William had expressly invited with the unconcealed agenda of hitting up “the old porker” (as he often ungraciously referred to his potential benefactor behind that gentleman’s ample posterior) for a generous donation to help fund his planned laboratory. Following his consultations with Elena in September, William had struck up a lively correspondence with the Connecticut railroad tycoon, cementing the bond that had been established when Alice James signed on as Hite’s daughter’s traveling companion. Mr. Hite prided himself on keeping abreast of all modern developments in science and technology—an informational appetite that was not, however, wholly in evidence at the present moment: Having dined and imbibed with his customary extravagance just before attending the lecture, the tycoon appeared to be nodding off in his seat, his odobenidan snores punctuating the professor’s carefully crafted speech like intermittent blasts of a rogue foghorn.
As William launched into a devastating critique of the dominant paradigms of the so-called elementistic psychologies of the day, a less than academically minded observer of the scene might have found his attention diverted to the belated arrival of a pair of strangers at the rear of the lecture hall. The two men, sporting elegant pinchback suits and jaunty bowler hats, were clearly too old and too stylishly attired to be students. The shorter of the pair walked with a pronounced limp, supporting his stride with a silver-headed ebony cane. His sandy-haired companion cautiously scanned the auditorium with his steel-blue eyes before taking a seat in the very last row of the amphitheater, ensuring that no one would be sitting behind him. William, warming to his subject, fortunately took no notice of these well-appointed interlopers, whose unlikely presence at the Museum of Comparative Zoology might otherwise have violently derailed the train of his disquisition.
The long flight of the James brothers from Northfield has gone down in the annals of American crime as one of the grand escape sagas of all time. As an editorialist for the Sedalia Bazoo in Missouri admiringly recorded: “They ran the gauntlet of Minnesota and Dakota for a distance of 490 miles, and the wildest exploits in the romance of Dick Turpin will not compare with this bold ride for life.”
Free of the Youngers and Henry James, at the earliest opportunity Frank and Jesse had abandoned the decrepit draft mare they had appropriated from the old German couple for a pair of sleeker mounts. Proceeding west at a swifter clip, they had thrown themselves into desperate survival mode: For days and nights, running on sheer guts and cussedness, the aching, exhausted, and starving former soldiers and bushwhackers had ridden as hard and fast as their horses could endure. More than once they had confronted their pursuers face-to-face, and it was during one such encounter that Jesse, who had thus far miraculously managed to avoid injury, had taken a blast from a shotgun in his right knee. Still the brothers pressed on.
The last confirmed sighting of the outlaws was reported on September 25 by a country doctor named Sidney Mosher whom Frank and Jesse had briefly kidnapped on the outskirts of Sioux City, Iowa. Before releasing the terrified physician, the bandits had forced him at gunpoint to dress their wounds and exchange his clothes and horse for Frank’s. “They let the doctor go, then rode south into the darkness,” recorded T. J. Stiles. “Their trail was never found again. Ruthless, relentless, and utterly iron-willed, they had outrun, outfought, and outsmarted perhaps a thousand pursuers, crossing hundreds of miles of hostile territory. And they had survived.” Indeed, there could have been no more vivid demonstration of William’s famous observation that “great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
Yet their ordeal was far from over. Despite the silence of the incarcerated Youngers, it had required no great feat of detective work for Chief James McDonough of the St. Louis Police Department to conclude that their accomplices at Northfield had almost certainly included the Jameses, with whom he knew Cole and his brothers to have been in criminal cahoots for over a decade. And just as Zerelda had predicted to Elena Hite when “the boys” set off on their adventure, McDonough’s men had wasted little time in staking out the Samuel farm. (William Pinkerton had correctly surmised that his elusive quarry would never be so foolhardy as to show their faces anywhere around their old Missouri haunts. The Big Man, as we shall learn, had taken a very different tack in his obsessive pursuit of the James brothers.) Meanwhile, just as they had elected to strike in remote Minnesota, the wily ex-guerrillas had once again plotted to go where they were least expected by determining—perhaps under the sway of memories and sentiments stirred up by Henry’s recent presence among them—to return to the genteel New England ground of their childhood.
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