To which his reply had been just of the happiest. I dont feel, my dear, if you really want to know, that anything much can now either hurt me or help me. Such as I ambut youll see for yourself. Say, however, I am a galantuomowhich I devoutly hope: Im like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce; cooked down as a creme de volaille, with half the parts left out. Your fathers the natural fowl running about the bassecour. His feathers, movements, his soundsthose are the parts that, with me, are left out.
All, as a matter of coursesince you cant eat a chicken alive!
The Prince had not been annoyed at this, but he had been positive. Well, Im eating your father alivewhich is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as its when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must also cultivate it, to get my pleasure. He couldnt make one like him so much in any other language.
It mattered little that the girl had continued to demurit was the mere play of her joy. I think he could make you like him in Chinese.
It would be an unnecessary trouble. What I mean is that hes a kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly FOR the tonewhich has made him possible.
Oh, youll hear enough of it, she laughed, before youve done with us.
Only this, in truth, had made him frown a little.
What do you mean, please, by my having done with you?
Why, found out about us all there is to find.
He had been able to take it indeed easily as a joke. Ah, love, I began with that. I know enough, I feel, never to be surprised. Its you yourselves meanwhile, he continued, who really know nothing. There are two parts of meyes, he had been moved to go on. One is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the crimes, the follies, the boundless betises of other peopleespecially of their infamous waste of money that might have come to me. Those things are writtenliterally in rows of volumes, in libraries; are as public as theyre abominable. Everybody can get at them, and youve, both of you, wonderfully, looked them in the face. But theres another part, very much smaller doubtless, which, such as it is, represents my single self, the unknown, unimportant, unimportantunimportant save to YOUpersonal quantity. About this youve found out nothing.
Luckily, my dear, the girl had bravely said; for what then would become, please, of the promised occupation of my future?
The young man remembered even now how extraordinarily CLEARhe couldnt call it anything elseshe had looked, in her prettiness, as she had said it. He also remembered what he had been moved to reply. The happiest reigns, we are taught, you know, are the reigns without any history.
Oh, Im not afraid of history! She had been sure of that. Call it the bad part, if you likeyours certainly sticks out of you. What was it else, Maggie Verver had also said, that made me originally think of you? It wasntas I should suppose you must have seenwhat you call your unknown quantity, your particular self. It was the generations behind you, the follies and the crimes, the plunder and the wastethe wicked Pope, the monster most of all, whom so many of the volumes in your family library are all about. If Ive read but two or three yet, I shall give myself up but the moreas soon as I have timeto the rest. Where, thereforeshe had put it to him againwithout your archives, annals, infamies, would you have been?
He recalled what, to this, he had gravely returned. I might have been in a somewhat better pecuniary situation. But his actual situation under the head in question positively so little mattered to them that, having by that time lived deep into the sense of his advantage, he had kept no impression of the girls rejoinder. It had but sweetened the waters in which he now floated, tinted them as by the action of some essence, poured from a gold-topped phial, for making ones bath aromatic. No one before him, nevernot even the infamous Popehad so sat up to his neck in such a bath. It showed, for that matter, how little one of his race could escape, after all, from history. What was it but history, and of THEIR kind very much, to have the assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the colourof what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these peoples, was all suffused. What he had further said on the occasion of which we thus represent him as catching the echoes from his own thoughts while he loiteredwhat he had further said came back to him, for it had been the voice itself of his luck, the soothing sound that was always with him. You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.
Of course we are. Thats just what makes everything so nice for us.
Everything? He had wondered.
Well, everything thats nice at all. The world, the beautiful, worldor everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much.
He had looked at her a momentand he well knew how she had struck him, in respect to the beautiful world, as one of the beautiful, the most beautiful things. But what he had answered was: You see too muchthats what may sometimes make you difficulties. When you dont, at least, he had amended with a further thought, see too little. But he had quite granted that he knew what she meant, and his warning perhaps was needless.
He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirsnothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties. Their enjoyment was a tribute to others without being a loss to themselves. Only the funny thing, he had respectfully submitted, was that her father, though older and wiser, and a man into the bargain, was as badthat is as goodas herself.
Oh, hes better, the girl had freely declared that is hes worse. His relation to the things he cares forand I think it beautifulis absolutely romantic. So is his whole life over hereits the most romantic thing I know.
You mean his idea for his native place?
Yesthe collection, the Museum with which he wishes to endow it, and of which he thinks more, as you know, than of anything in the world. Its the work of his life and the motive of everything he does.
The young man, in his actual mood, could have smiled againsmiled delicately, as he had then smiled at her. Has it been his motive in letting me have you?
Yes, my dear, positivelyor in a manner, she had said.
American City isnt, by the way, his native town, for, though hes not old, its a young thing compared with hima younger one. He started there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says, like the programme of a charity performance. Youre at any rate a part of his collection, she had explainedone of the things that can only be got over here. Youre a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price. Youre not perhaps absolutely unique, but youre so curious and eminent that there are very few others like youyou belong to a class about which everything is known. Youre what they call a morceau de musee.