PARTISAN
~EVIEW
201
initiation into the epistemology of good and evil is represented as
a dark ancestral crime hidden beneath - and suggested by - the
gilded surface of Faubourg Saint-Germain society: depths open be–
neath the well-guarded social image of the Bellegarde family; crisis
is
revelation of sin, and Newman's consciousness must expand to re–
ceive the lurid, flashing lights of melodrama. But even in James's
latest and most subtle fiction - probably most of all in this fiction–
the excitement of plot is generated exclusively from conflict within
the realm of the moral occult. There is a pressure similar to Balzac's
on the surface of things, to make reality yield the terms of the drama
of
this
moral occult. To take deliberately a fairly low-keyed example,
from
The Ambassadors:
following the revelation of Mme. de Vion–
net's relationship with Chad, Strether goes to pay her a fmal visit.
He stands for the last time in her apartment:
From beyond this, and as from a great distance - beyond the
court, beyond the corps de logis forming the front - came, as
if
excited and exciting, the vague voice of Paris. Strether had all
along been subject to sudden gusts of fancy in connexion with such
matters as these - odd starts of the historic sense, suppositions and
divinations with no warrant but their intensity. Thus and so, on
the eve of the great recorded dates, the days and nights of revolu–
tion, the sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings broken out.
They were the smell of revolution, the smell of the public temper–
or perhaps simply the smell of blood.
That
this
vision
is
ascribed to Strether's "gusts of fancy" does not
really
hedge the bet. James makes the "unwarranted" vision
exist,
wrests
forth from "beyond" the facades of Paris sinister implications
m
impending disaster, chaos, and pervades the final encounter of
Strether and Mme. de Vionnet with "the smell of blood."
Their
rela–
tion
has
all
along been based on Strether's "exorbitant" commit–
ment
to "save her"
if
he could. Here, the evocation of bloody sacrifice,
eliciting
a state of moral exorbitance, authorizes the intensity of the
encounter, where Strether sees Mme. de Vionnet as resembling Mme.
R.oland on the scaffold, and where he moves to his most penetrating
vision of the realm of moral forces in which she struggles. "With this
Iharpest
perception yet, it was like a chill in the air to him, it was
almost
appalling, that a creature so fine could be, by mysterious
forces,
a creature so exploited." Strether, and James, have pierced
through to a medium in which Mme. de Vionnet can be seen as a
