The Ambassadors

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. Lambert Strether says this to a young man in a Paris garden, urging a life he never let himself have. He has crossed the Atlantic for the widow he hopes to marry, sent to pry her son Chad from a Paris entanglement and bring him home to the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts. But it is Strether who comes undone. The light on the boulevards, the unashamed ease of the people, the sight of Chad transformed, softened, made somehow more himself: all of it works on Strether like a slow conversion. He decides the woman behind it, Madame de Vionnet, must be an influence too fine to be improper, until an afternoon on the river shows him the two of them together in a boat, unmistakably lovers, and shows him how much of his life he has spent not looking. He goes home with no wife, no fortune, and the one thing he came too late to use: he finally knows what living costs.