have jumped then, the Bellegardes, at my rich and easy
American, and not have minded in the least any drawback - especially as, after
all, given the pleasant palette from which I have painted him, there were few
drawbacks to mind. My subject imposed on me a group of closely-allied persons
animated by immense pretensions - which was all very well, which might be full
of the promise of interest: only of interest felt most of all in the light of
comedy and of irony. This, better understood, would have dwelt in the idea not
in the least of their not finding Newman good enough for their alliance and
thence being ready to sacrifice him, but in that of their taking with alacrity
everything he could give them, only asking for more and more, and then adjusting
their pretensions and their pride to it with all the comfort in life. Such
accommodation of the theory of a noble indifference to the practice of a deep
avidity is the real note of policy in forlorn aristocracies - and I meant of
course that the Bellegardes should be virtually forlorn. The perversion of truth
is by no means, I think, in the displayed acuteness of their remembrance of who
and what they are, or at any rate take themselves for; since it is the
misfortune of all insistence on worldly advantages - and the situation of such
people bristles at the best (by which I mean under whatever invocation of a
superficial simplicity) with emphasis, accent, assumption - to produce at times
an effect of grossness. The picture of their tergiversation, at all events,
however it may originally have seemed to me to hang together, has taken on this
rococo appearance precisely because their preferred course, a thousand times
preferred, would have been to haul him and his fortune into their boat under
cover of night perhaps, in any case as quietly and with as little bumping and
splashing as possible, and there accommodate him with the very safest and most
convenient seat. Given Newman, given the fact that the thing constitutes itself
organically as his adventure, that too might very well be a situation and a
subject: only it wouldn't have been the theme of The American as the book
stands, the theme to which I was from so early pledged. Since I had wanted a
wrong this other turn might even have been arranged to give me that, might even
have been arranged to meet my requirement that somebody or something should be
in his power so delightfully; and with the signal effect, after all, of defining
everything. (It is as difficult, I said above, to trace the dividing