The Ambassadors

"The difficulty is," Strether said to Madame de Vionnet a couple of days later, "that I can't surprise them into the smallest sign of his not being the same old Chad they've been for the last three years glowering at across the sea. They simply won't give any, and as a policy, you know—what you call a _parti pris_, a deep game—that's positively remarkable."

Lambert Strether's mission inverted—from envoy to advocate to renouncer—turns consciousness awakening into structural reversal, with Woollett resistance and final renunciation completing James's most rigorous design, so plot scores 88.

He read thus the simple designation "Maria Gostrey," to which was attached, in a corner of the card, with a number, the name of a street, presumably in Paris, without other appreciable identity than its foreignness. It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey, whoever she was—of which he hadn't really the least idea—in a place of safe keeping.

Strether, Chad, Madame de Vionnet, Maria Gostrey, Waymarsh, and Little Bilham each offer a distinct angle on the international theme; Strether alone would carry a lesser book, so cast scores 90.

His confession was that he had been captured and that one of the features of the affair had just failed to be his engaging himself on the spot to dinner. As by such a freedom Waymarsh would have lost him he had obeyed his scruple; and he had likewise obeyed another scruple—which bore on the question of his himself bringing a guest.

Late James tempo dilates through Chester walks and Paris conversation; the Woollett arrivals accelerate Book IX onward, but the middle Books trade event for nuance, so pace scores 82 on structural rhythm.

In the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at play all sunnily "composed" together, he passed an hour in which the cup of his impressions seemed truly to overflow.

Among James's finest—the long sentence capturing thought in motion and free indirect depth make Strether's inner life the primary action, so prose scores 95.

This assault of images became for a moment, in the address of the distinguished sculptor, almost formidable: Gloriani showed him, in such perfect confidence, on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue.

Chester as threshold and Paris—the Luxembourg, Gloriani's garden, Madame de Vionnet's _cité_—map American innocence against European civilization with Woollett haunting every hour, so world scores 90.

Strether's first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room "only if not noisy," reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office.

Book First establishes the international envoy's tentative arrival—Waymarsh delayed, the mission not yet begun—solid scene-setting that defers narrative ignition to Chad's entrance, so hook scores 86.

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what _have_ you had? I'm too old—too old at any rate for what I see."

The ambassador who converts to the enemy camp and the late-James method of making a single middle-aged consciousness the entire plot engine—with renunciation as triumph—so innov scores 92.

"That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself." She thought. "But with your wonderful impressions you'll have got a great deal." "A great deal"—he agreed. "But nothing like _you_. It's you who would make me wrong!"

"Then there we are!"—Strether's refusal of Maria Gostrey and return to Woollett empty-handed but spiritually enriched is among the greatest endings in English fiction, so ending scores 94.