The Aspern Papers

by Henry James
THE ASPERN PAPERS

I
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 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 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, half-sententiously 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 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 shabbybehavior. 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