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 "Standing on his balcony and enjoying the hustle and bustle of the Parisian street and the fragrant spring air, a man watches another man gazing longingly into a hairdresser’s shop window. Thus begins James’s 1878 tale, ‘Théodolinde’, later renamed ‘Rose-Agathe’. The man on the balcony is James’s anonymous American narrator, and the figure he is watching is his friend Sanguinetti, an Italian-American antique collector and ‘the perfect authority on pretty things’. The narrator assumes that the object of his friend’s admiration is the hairdresser’s beautiful wife, and over the coming weeks he observes with amusement his determined, business-like approach towards ‘making her [his] own’. It is not until Sanguinetti achieves this end and invites his friend home to admire his new acquisition that the narrator realizes his mistake. Instead of finding a lovely woman, he sees the blonde-haired wax dummy that had previously been placed in the coiffeur’s shop window as an advertisement." |
