France, French, and the French

E Savoy - The Henry James Review, 2009 - muse.jhu.edu
The Henry James Review, 2009muse.jhu.edu
In the world of Henry James, the surest sign of an expatriate's sophistication is the tendency—
at once emphatic and off-hand—to sprinkle the conversational mix with French words and
phrases. Has Madame de Vionnet led a “beautiful life?”“Allez donc voir!”(AB 144) is Chad's
airy advice to Strether, who, charmed by the wonderful taste of notre jeune homme, charts
his ambassadorial course between two chiming French verbs: the immediate pleasures of
“voir” and the shifting complexities of “savoir.” If the former is a matter of the boiseries in the …
In the world of Henry James, the surest sign of an expatriate’s sophistication is the tendency—at once emphatic and off-hand—to sprinkle the conversational mix with French words and phrases. Has Madame de Vionnet led a “beautiful life?”“Allez donc voir!”(AB 144) is Chad’s airy advice to Strether, who, charmed by the wonderful taste of notre jeune homme, charts his ambassadorial course between two chiming French verbs: the immediate pleasures of “voir” and the shifting complexities of “savoir.” If the former is a matter of the boiseries in the petit salon of Madame de Vionnet, conducted in the midst of old accumulations and the clatter of sabots from the courtyard and sustained by the occasional omelette aux tomates on intensely white table linen, its relation to the latter is, as we might say in a more recent French, pure différance.
There’sa plain difference—to use the old-fashioned English word—between the Paris of The American and that of The Ambassadors. Christopher Newman appears in the Louvre, possessing a single French word—“combien?”—and remains unsophisticated, an outsider, unversed in the veille sagesse upon which French “arrange-
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