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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
VOLUME I
PREFACE
"The Portrait of a Lady" was, like "Roderick Hudson," begun in Florence, during three months
spent there in the spring of 1879. Like "Roderick" and like "The American," it had been designed
for publication in "The Atlantic Monthly," where it began to appear in 1880. It differed from its
two predecessors, however, in finding a course also open to it, from month to month, in
"Macmillan's Magazine"; which was to be for me one of the last occasions of simultaneous
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"serialisation" in the two countries that the changing conditions of literary intercourse between
England and the United States had up to then left unaltered. It is a long novel, and I was long in
writing it; I remember being again much occupied with it, the following year, during a stay of
several weeks made in Venice. I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the
passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and
the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself to have
been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue
channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my
subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn't come into sight. But I recall vividly enough
that the response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition
that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable
aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their
own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase; they
draw him away from his small question to their own greater ones; so that, after a little, he feels,
while thus yearning toward them in his difficulty, as if he were asking an army of glorious veterans
to help him to arrest a peddler who has given him the wrong change.
There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed to make me see again the
bristling curve of the wide Riva, the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated
undulation of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, of
foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry--all talk there,
wherever uttered, having the pitch of a call across the water--come in once more at the window,
renewing one's old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated mind. How can
places that speak IN GENERAL so to the imagination not give it, at the moment, the particular
thing it wants? I recollect again and again, in beautiful places, dropping into that wonderment. The
real truth is, I think, that they express, under this appeal, only too much--more than, in the given
case, one has use for; so that one finds one's self working less congruously, after all, so far as the
surrounding picture is concerned, than in presence of the moderate and the neutral, to which we
may lend something of the light of our vision. Such a place as Venice is too proud for such
charities; Venice doesn't borrow, she but all magnificently gives. We profit by that enormously,
but to do so we must either be quite off duty or be on it in her service alone. Such, and so rueful,
are these reminiscences; though on the whole, no doubt, one's book, and one's "literary effort" at
large, were to be the better for them. Strangely fertilising, in the long run, does a wasted effort of
attention often prove. It all depends on HOW the attention has been cheated, has been squandered.
There are high-handed insolent frauds, and there are insidious sneaking ones. And there is, I fear,
even on the most designing artist's part, always witless enough good faith, always anxious enough
desire, to fail to guard him against their deceits.
Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at
all in any conceit of a "plot," nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or
in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into
movement, into a march or a rush, a patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single
character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual
elements of a "subject," certainly of a setting, were to need to be super added. Quite as interesting
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as the young woman herself at her best, do I find, I must again repeat, this projection of memory
upon the whole matter of the growth, in one's imagination, of some such apology for a motive.
These are the fascinations of the fabulist's art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities
of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to
grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as
much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the
intimate history of the business--of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages. I have always
fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenieff in regard
to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with
the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or
passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He
saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of
existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would
most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful
and favourable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most
likely to produce and to feel.
"To arrive at these things is to arrive at my story," he said, "and that's the way I look for it. The
result is that I'm often accused of not having 'story' enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I
need--to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I
watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them PLACED, I see them engaged in
this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave,
always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them--of which I dare say, alas, que
cela manque souvent d'architecture. But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too
much--when there's danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course
like more of it than I give-- having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must
give all one can. As for the origin of one's wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you
ask, where THEY come from? We have to go too far back, too far behind, to say. Isn't it all we can
say that they come from every quarter of heaven, that they are THERE at almost any turn of the
road? They accumulate, and we are always picking them over, selecting among them. They are the
breath of life--by which I mean that life, in its own way, breathes them upon us. They are so, in a
manner prescribed and imposed--floated into our minds by the current of life. That reduces to
imbecility the vain critic's quarrel, so often, with one's subject, when he hasn't the wit to accept it.
Will he point out then which other it should properly have been? --his office being, essentially to
point out. Il en serait bien embarrasse. Ah, when he points out what I've done or failed to do with
it, that's another matter: there he's on his ground. I give him up my 'sarchitecture,'" my
distinguished friend concluded, "as much as he will."
So this beautiful genius, and I recall with comfort the gratitude I drew from his reference to the
intensity of suggestion that may reside in the stray figure, the unattached character, the image en
disponibilite. It gave me higher warrant than I seemed then to have met for just that blest habit of
one's own imagination, the trick of investing some conceived or encountered individual, some
brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and authority. I was myself so much
more antecedently conscious of my figures than of their setting--a too preliminary, a preferential
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interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the cart before the horse. I might envy,
though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first and to make
out its agents afterwards. I could think so little of any fable that didn't need its agents positively to
launch it; I could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of
the persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called
presentation, I believe among novelists who have appeared to flourish--that offer the situation as
indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at the time, of the
admirable Russian's testimony to my not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such
gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly--if it be not
all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one's uses, high
lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even
quite into that of the critical appreciation, of "subject" in the novel.
One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right estimate of such values
and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the "immoral" subject and the moral.
Recognising so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it
that, rightly answered, disposes of all others--is it valid, in a word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the
result of some direct impression or perception of life?--I had found small edification, mostly, in a
critical pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of ground and all definition of
terms. The air of my earlier time shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that vanity-unless
the difference to-day be just in one's own final impatience, the lapse of one's attention.
There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect
dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing
it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime
sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil,
its ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision of life, represents, strongly or
weakly, the projected morality. That element is but another name for the more or less close
connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere experience.
By which, at the same time, of course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of the
artist's humanity--which gives the last touch to the worth of the work--is not a widely and
wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and magnificent medium and on
another a comparatively poor and ungenerous one. Here we get exactly the high price of the novel
as a literary form--its power not only, while preserving that form with closeness, to range through
all the differences of the individual relation to its general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook
on life, of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that are never the same from
man to man (or, so far as that goes, from man to woman), but positively to appear more true to its
character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million-- a number of possible windows
not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast
front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These
apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might
have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best,
mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight
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upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of
eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique
instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and
his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one
seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing
coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for
the particular pair of eyes, the window may NOT open; "fortunately" by reason, precisely, of this
incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the
pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but
they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher--without, in
other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he
has BEEN conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his
"moral" reference.
All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward "The
Portrait," which was exactly my grasp of a single character--an acquisition I had made, moreover,
after a fashion not here to be retraced. Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession
of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its
charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. This
amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate--some fate or other; which, among the
possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual--vivid, so strangely, in
spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we
look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. If the apparition was still all to be placed
how came it to be vivid?--since we puzzle such quantities out, mostly, just by the business of
placing them. One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if
not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one's imagination. One would
describe then what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for
instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it
had been able to take over (take over straight from life) such and such a constituted, animated
figure or form. The figure has to that extent, as you see, BEEN placed--placed in the imagination
that detains it, preserves, protects, enjoys it, conscious of its presence in the dusky, crowded,
heterogeneous back-shop of the mind very much as a wary dealer in precious odds and ends,
competent to make an "advance" on rare objects confided to him, is conscious of the rare little
"piece" left in deposit by the reduced, mysterious lady of title or the speculative amateur, and
which is already there to disclose its merit afresh as soon as a key shall have clicked in a cupboard-
door.
That may he, I recognise, a somewhat superfine analogy for the particular "value" I here speak of,
the image of the young feminine nature that I had had for so considerable a time all curiously at
my disposal; but it appears to fond memory quite to fit the fact--with the recall, in addition, of my
pious desire but to place my treasure right. I quite remind myself thus of the dealer resigned not to
"realise," resigned to keeping the precious object locked up indefinitely rather than commit it, at no
matter what price, to vulgar hands. For there ARE dealers in these forms and figures and treasures
capable of that refinement. The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone, the
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conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for
the large building of "The Portrait of a Lady." It came to be a square and spacious house-- or has at
least seemed so to me in this going over it again; but, such as it is, it had to be put up round my
young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. That is to me, artistically speaking, the
circumstance of interest; for I have lost myself once more, I confess, in the curiosity of analysing
the structure. By what process of logical accretion was this slight "personality," the mere slim
shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a
Subject?--and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions
of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open
to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it? The novel is of its very
nature an "ado," an ado about something, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the
ado. Therefore, consciously, that was what one was in for--for positively organising an ado about
Isabel Archer.
One looked it well in the face, I seem to remember, this extravagance; and with the effect precisely
of recognising the charm of the problem. Challenge any such problem with any intelligence, and
you immediately see how full it is of substance; the wonder being, all the while, as we look at the
world, how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry,
insist on mattering. George Eliot has admirably noted it--"In these frail vessels is borne onward
through the ages the treasure of human affection." In "Romeo and Juliet" Juliet has to be
important, just as, in "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss" and "Middlemarch" and "Daniel
Deronda," Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver and Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth have to
be; with that much of firm ground, that much of bracing air, at the disposal all the while of their
feet and their lungs. They are typical, none the less, of a class difficult, in the individual case, to
make a centre of interest; so difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance Dickens
and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as that of R. L. Stevenson, has
preferred to leave the task unattempted. There are in fact writers as to whom we make out that their
refuge from this is to assume it to be not worth their attempting; by which pusillanimity in truth
their honour is scantly saved. It is never an attestation of a value, or even of our imperfect sense of
one, it is never a tribute to any truth at all, that we shall represent that value badly. It never makes
up, artistically, for an artist's dim feeling about a thing that he shall "do" the thing as ill as possible.
There are better ways than that, the best of all of which is to begin with less stupidity.
It may be answered meanwhile, in regard to Shakespeare's and to George Eliot's testimony, that
their concession to the "importance" of their Juliets and Cleopatras and Portias (even with Portia as
the very type and model of the young person intelligent and presumptuous) and to that of their
Hettys and Maggies and Rosamonds and Gwendolens, suffers the abatement that these slimnesses
are, when figuring as the main props of the theme, never suffered to be sole ministers of its appeal,
but have their inadequacy eked out with comic relief and underplots, as the playwrights say, when
not with murders and battles and the great mutations of the world. If they are shown as "mattering"
as much as they could possibly pretend to, the proof of it is in a hundred other persons, made of
much stouter stuff; and each involved moreover in a hundred relations which matter to THEM
concomitantly with that one. Cleopatra matters, beyond bounds, to Antony, but his colleagues, his
antagonists, the state of Rome and the impending battle also prodigiously matter; Portia matters to
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Antonio, and to Shylock, and to the Prince of Morocco, to the fifty aspiring princes, but for these
gentry there are other lively concerns; for Antonio, notably, there are Shylock and Bassanio and
his lost ventures and the extremity of his predicament. This extremity indeed, by the same token,
matters to Portia--though its doing so becomes of interest all by the fact that Portia matters to US.
That she does so, at any rate, and that almost everything comes round to it again, supports my
contention as to this fine example of the value recognised in the mere young thing. (I say "mere"
young thing because I guess that even Shakespeare, preoccupied mainly though he may have been
with the passions of princes, would scarce have pretended to found the best of his appeal for her on
her high social position.) It is an example exactly of the deep difficulty braved--the difficulty of
making George Eliot's "frail vessel," if not the all-in-all for our attention, at least the clearest of the
call.
Now to see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even
as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified.
The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case
permits of. So I remember feeling here (in presence, always, that is, of the particular uncertainty of
my ground), that there would be one way better than another--oh, ever so much better than any
other!-- of making it fight out its battle. The frail vessel, that charged with George Eliot's
"treasure," and thereby of such importance to those who curiously approach it, has likewise
possibilities of importance to itself, possibilities which permit of treatment and in fact peculiarly
require it from the moment they are considered at all. There is always the escape from any close
account of the weak agent of such spells by using as a bridge for evasion, for retreat and flight, the
view of her relation to those surrounding her. Make it predominantly a view of THEIR relation and
the trick is played: you give the general sense of her effect, and you give it, so far as the raising on
it of a superstructure goes, with the maximum of ease. Well, I recall perfectly how little, in my
now quite established connexion, the maximum of ease appealed to me, and how I seemed to get
rid of it by an honest transposition of the weights in the two scales. "Place the centre of the subject
in the young woman's own consciousness," I said to myself, "and you get as interesting and as
beautiful a difficulty as you could wish. Stick to THAT--for the centre; put the heaviest weight into
THAT scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation to herself. Make her only interested
enough, at the same time, in the things that are not herself, and this relation needn't fear to be too
limited. Place meanwhile in the other scale the lighter weight (which is usually the one that tips the
balance of interest): press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your heroine's satellites,
especially the male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater one. See, at all events, what
can be done in this way. What better field could there be for a due ingenuity? The girl hovers,
inextinguishable, as a charming creature, and the job will be to translate her into the highest terms
of that formula, and as nearly as possible moreover into ALL of them. To depend upon her and her
little concerns wholly to see you through will necessitate, remember, your really 'doing' her."
So far I reasoned, and it took nothing less than that technical rigour, I now easily see, to inspire me
with the right confidence for erecting on such a plot of ground the neat and careful and
proportioned pile of bricks that arches over it and that was thus to form, constructionally speaking,
a literary monument. Such is the aspect that to-day "The Portrait" wears for me: a structure reared
with an "architectural" competence, as Turgenieff would have said, that makes it, to the author's
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own sense, the most proportioned of his productions after "The Ambassadors" which was to follow
it so many years later and which has, no doubt, a superior roundness. On one thing I was
determined; that, though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an
interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or perspective. I
would build large--in fine embossed vaults and painted arches, as who should say, and yet never
let it appear that the chequered pavement, the ground under the reader's feet, fails to stretch at
every point to the base of the walls. That precautionary spirit, on re-perusal of the book, is the old
note that most touches me: it testifies so, for my own ear, to the anxiety of my provision for the
reader's amusement. I felt, in view of the possible limitations of my subject, that no such provision
could be excessive, and the development of the latter was simply the general form of that earnest
quest. And I find indeed that this is the only account I can give myself of the evolution of the fable
it is all under the head thus named that I conceive the needful accretion as having taken place, the
right complications as having started. It was naturally of the essence that the young woman should
be herself complex; that was rudimentary--or was at any rate the light in which Isabel Archer had
originally dawned. It went, however, but a certain way, and other lights, contending, conflicting
lights, and of as many different colours, if possible, as the rockets, the Roman candles and
Catherine-wheels of a "pyrotechnic display," would be employable to attest that she was. I had, no
doubt, a groping instinct for the right complications, since I am quite unable to track the footsteps
of those that constitute, as the case stands, the general situation exhibited. They are there, for what
they are worth, and as numerous as might be; but my memory, I confess, is a blank as to how and
whence they came.
I seem to myself to have waked up one morning in possession of them--of Ralph Touchett and his
parents, of Madame Merle, of Gilbert Osmond and his daughter and his sister, of Lord Warburton,
Caspar Goodwood and Miss Stackpole, the definite array of contributions to Isabel Archer's
history. I recognised them, I knew them, they were the numbered pieces of my puzzle, the concrete
terms of my "plot." It was as if they had simply, by an impulse of their own, floated into my ken,
and all in response to my primary question: "Well, what will she DO?" Their answer seemed to be
that if I would trust them they would show me; on which, with an urgent appeal to them to make it
at least as interesting as they could, I trusted them. They were like the group of attendants and
entertainers who come down by train when people in the country give a party; they represented the
contract for carrying the party on. That was an excellent relation with them --a possible one even
with so broken a reed (from her slightness of cohesion) as Henrietta Stackpole. It is a familiar truth
to the novelist, at the strenuous hour, that, as certain elements in any work are of the essence, so
others are only of the form; that as this or that character, this or that disposition of the material,
belongs to the subject directly, so to speak, so this or that other belongs to it but indirectly--belongs
intimately to the treatment. This is a truth, however, of which he rarely gets the benefit--since it
could be assured to him, really, but by criticism based upon perception, criticism which is too little
of this world. He must not think of benefits, moreover, I freely recognise, for that way dishonour
lies: he has, that is, but one to think of--the benefit, whatever it may be, involved in his having cast
a spell upon the simpler, the very simplest, forms of attention. This is all he is entitled to; he is
entitled to nothing, he is bound to admit, that can come to him, from the reader, as a result on the
latter's part of any act of reflexion or discrimination. He may ENJOY this finer tribute--that is
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another affair, but on condition only of taking it as a gratuity "thrown in," a mere miraculous
windfall, the fruit of a tree he may not pretend to have shaken. Against reflexion, against
discrimination, in his interest, all earth and air conspire; wherefore it is that, as I say, he must in
many a case have schooled himself, from the first, to work but for a "living wage." The living
wage is the reader's grant of the least possible quantity of attention required for consciousness of a
"spell." The occasional charming "tip" is an act of his intelligence over and beyond this, a golden
apple, for the writer's lap, straight from the wind-stirred tree. The artist may of course, in wanton
moods, dream of some Paradise (for art) where the direct appeal to the intelligence might be
legalised; for to such extravagances as these his yearning mind can scarce hope ever completely to
close itself. The most he can do is to remember they ARE extravagances.
All of which is perhaps but a gracefully devious way of saying that Henrietta Stackpole was a good
example, in "The Portrait," of the truth to which I just adverted--as good an example as I could
name were it not that Maria Gostrey, in "The Ambassadors," then in the bosom of time, may be
mentioned as a better. Each of these persons is but wheels to the coach; neither belongs to the body
of that vehicle, or is for a moment accommodated with a seat inside. There the subject alone is
ensconced, in the form of its "hero and heroine," and of the privileged high officials, say, who ride
with the king and queen. There are reasons why one would have liked this to be felt, as in general
one would like almost anything to be felt, in one's work, that one has one's self contributively felt.
We have seen, however, how idle is that pretension, which I should be sorry to make too much of.
Maria Gostrey and Miss Stackpole then are cases, each, of the light ficelle, not of the true agent;
they may run beside the coach "for all they are worth," they may cling to it till they are out of
breath (as poor Miss Stackpole all so visibly does), but neither, all the while, so much as gets her
foot on the step, neither ceases for a moment to tread the dusty road. Put it even that they are like
the fishwives who helped to bring back to Paris from Versailles, on that most ominous day of the
first half of the French Revolution, the carriage of the royal family. The only thing is that I may
well be asked, I acknowledge, why then, in the present fiction, I have suffered Henrietta (of whom
we have indubitably too much) so officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade. I
will presently say what I can for that anomaly--and in the most conciliatory fashion.
A point I wish still more to make is that if my relation of confidence with the actors in my drama
who WERE, unlike Miss Stackpole, true agents, was an excellent one to have arrived at, there still
remained my relation with the reader, which was another affair altogether and as to which I felt no
one to be trusted but myself. That solicitude was to be accordingly expressed in the artful patience
