There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau had had in her youth a perverse and adventurous, albeit a generous and fascinating character, and that she had passed through some singular vicissitudes.
By what passions had she been ravaged, by what sufferings had she been blanched, what store of memories had she laid away for the monotonous future?
I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about her in my arbor and the bees droned in the flowers.
It was incontestable that, whether for right or for wrong, most readers of certain of Aspern's poems (poems not as ambiguous as the sonnets--scarcely more divine, I think--of Shakespeare) had taken for granted that Juliana had not always adhered to the steep footway of renunciation.
There hovered about her name a perfume of reckless passion, an intimation that she had not been exactly as the respectable young person in general.Was this a sign that her singer had betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to posterity?
Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put one's finger on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an imputation.
Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration 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 at other times had done so a great deal more.It was a much more important fact, if one were looking at his genius critically, that he had lived in the days before the general transfusion.
It had happened to me to regret that he had known Europe at all;I should have liked to see what he would have written without that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.
But as his fate had ordered otherwise I went with him--I tried to judge how the Old World would have struck him.
It was not only there, however, that I watched him; the relations he had entertained with the new had even a livelier interest.
His own country after all had had most of his life, and his muse, as they said at that time, was essentially American.
That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous "atmosphere" it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form almost impossible, he had found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid;to feel, understand, and express everything.