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.
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