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