From the early days of the Republic, Americans toured Europe for a variety of reasons, and some went to live there for the additional reason of economy. Not only were services cheaper, but they were also superior to their American equivalents. If we consider that very few Americans thought of service as desirable career path, and that America itself was not seen as a tourist destination, the affordability of Europe makes a kind of sense that has little to do with favorable exchange rates, although those were certainly an attraction.

The writer Henry James and his siblings were raised in Europe partly for economy in this extended sense: not only did it stretch the purchasing power of his peripatetic father’s inherited dollars, but it allowed Henry James Sr to provide the family with genteel, well-kept accommodation in a variety of European cities. Coming from a similar background, the painter John Singer Sargent, James’s junior by twenty-odd years, was born in Florence to an American couple that had abandoned the United States ostensibly for the wife’s health. Sargent did not set foot in the United States until he was a young man.

By that time, Henry James had settled in Europe. Aside from economy (no small consideration for him), there was the attraction of the life of the mind, which was difficult to cultivate in the United States, certainly outside of what was then a rather circumscribed academic world. James was no systematic thinker, but his writing evinces a keen moral philosophy that is centered largely on the conflict between experience and innocence. This is often simplified by his readers as a campaign of evil against good, as exemplified by corrupt Europeans and their naïve American victims. In some of James’s keenest fiction, however, it is transplanted Americans who are corrupt, most notably Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, in The Portrait of a Lady.

In “The Pension Beaurepas,” a long short story first published in 1879, not only do Americans occupy all of the active roles (with Mme Beaurepas and M Pigeonneau supplying commentary), but there is no corruption — in this story, everyone’s hands are clean. Aside from the narrator, who is clearly a stand-in for the author (and who can be quite unnecessarily taken as an example of the writer’s personal unwillingness to commit to romantic attachments), we have two American families, the Rusks and the Churches, all staying at the eponymous boarding house in Geneva. The Rusks recall “Daisy Miller,” published only the year before (and a work that is far better known than “The Pension Beaurepas”). They are unpolished Americans of fortune, touring Europe without quite knowing why. The Churches, in contrast, foreshadow a situation from The Awkward Age, a much later novel in which James repeatedly alludes to a cynical mother’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to preserve her daughter’s innocence by keeping the girl ignorant of the world.

The member of the Rusk family whom we get to know best is the father. (It will be recalled that Daisy Miller’s father is named but does not appear in her tale.) Mr Rusk presents himself as a businessman, but it emerges that he would more accurately be called an investor or even a speculator. An unhappy man, he is apparently a victim of the depression that followed the Panic of 1873. James does not spell this out, but it explains why Mr Rusk has been advised by his doctors to take a break, in the form of an extended trip to Europe. He complains that there is nothing for him to do about his “lumber” interests at home, which suggests to me that he is a promoter without prospects for real-estate developments in a flat market (there really is nothing to do.) Almost worse than the after-effects of the Panic, however, are the depredations of his wife and daughter, whose only interest appears to be shopping for and buying extravagant clothes and jewels. Like Undine Spragg’s father (in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country), Mr Rusk seems powerless to halt the fatal fiscal drain.

If Mr Rusk and his ladies are tragicomic caricatures of the American abroad, Mrs Church brings to mind quite different figures from James’s fiction, namely Mme Merle, Mme de Bellegarde (the materfamilias in The American), and Charlotte Stant. These ladies, usually Anglophone by birth, pursue their oblique, even gothic objectives with a suave ruthlessness that earns the grudging respect of narrators and readers. Although there does not appear to be anything sinister about the schemes of Mrs Church, she is almost as redoubtable as those anti-heroines. She hopes to find a suitable husband for her daughter, Aurora, whom she has been conducting on an occult tour of European cities since the latter’s childhood, and she intends to preserve Aurora in a state of innocence unblemished by unsuitable male attentions. The plan is perhaps grandiose, given that Aurora will not have much of a dowry — an obstacle of which Aurora herself is well-aware. Although relatively poor, Mrs Church makes demands on Mme Beaurepas’s establishment with the assurance of a wealthy woman. Aurora’s awareness of her mother’s arguably deluded determination, expressed on two somewhat surreptitious occasions to the narrator, are to my mind the heart of the story, affording an early look into one of James’s central preoccupations, namely, what do those who are supposed to be innocent (and ignorant) actually know? These vulnerable creatures are usually girls, but Morgan Moreen (“The Pupil”) and little Miles (“The Turn of the Screw”) are important members of the group. Morgan, almost comically precocious, often sounds like a fiftyish man of the world.

It seems to me that these English and American characters, and not the glamorously impecunious figures of “old” Europe, best exemplified by Prince Amerigo, that provided James with his best artistic reasons for settling in Europe. Little Miles aside, their having left home behind for the new world of old Europe has, by depriving them of the of the advantages of protective coloration, exposed them to the scrutiny of an articulate expatriate. Back in Manhattan, shuttling between Wall Street and Murray Hill, Mr Rusk would be unpromising material for a writer, no more visible perhaps than the less distinguishable of Catherine Sloper’s cousins. On the shores of Lake Geneva, however, he is a fish out of water, a fully mortal creature, no more “interesting,” perhaps, but vastly more vivid, in his tilting top hat, than a shuffling New Yorker. However personal and economic Henry James’s decision to settle in Europe might have been, it brought him incalculable riches from home.