is that it would have been difficult to put one's
finger on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an imputation.
Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration and
was associated with works immortal through their beauty? It was a
part of my idea that the young lady had had a foreign lover (and an
unedifying tragical rupture) before her meeting with Jeffrey Aspern.
She had lived with her father and sister in a queer old-fashioned,
expatriated, artistic Bohemia, in the days when the aesthetic was only
the academic and the painters who knew the best models for a contadina
and pifferaro wore peaked hats and long hair. It was a society less
furnished than the coteries of today (in its ignorance of the wonderful
chances, the opportunities of the early bird, with which its path was
strewn), with tatters of old stuff and fragments of old crockery; so
that Miss Bordereau appeared not to have picked up or have inherited
many objects of importance. There was no enviable bric-a-brac, with its
provoking legend of cheapness, in the room in which I had seen her. Such
a fact as that suggested bareness, but nonetheless it worked happily
into the sentimental interest I had always taken in the early movements
of my countrymen as visitors to Europe. When Americans went abroad in
1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with
the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, when photography and other
conveniences have annihilated surprise. Miss Bordereau sailed with
her family on a tossing brig, in the days of long voyages and sharp
differences; she had her emotions on the top of yellow diligences,
passed the night at inns where she dreamed of travelers' tales, and was
struck, on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of Roman pearls
and scarfs. There was something touching to me in all that, and my
imagination frequently went back to the period. If Miss Bordereau
carried it there of course Jeffrey Aspern at other times had done so a
great deal more. It was a much more important fact, if one were looking
at his genius critically, that he had lived in the days before the
general transfusion. It had happened to me to regret that he had known
Europe at all; I should have liked to see what he would have written
without that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.
But as his fate had ordered otherwise I went with him--I tried to judge
how the Old World would have struck him. It