Comte italien, le "dernier des Valerii" épouse une jeune et riche Américaine aussi éprise de sa beauté virile que de son patrimoine, dont les vestiges - statues et sarcophages rongés de moisissures - ornent les jardins de sa villa romaine. Mais le jour où l'on déterre une statue de Junon, la vie du comte est bouleversée...

Le dernier des Valerii ; the last of the Valerii

Dans tous les récits de Henry James, il y a une présence invisible et inquiétante. Pourtant, il ne s'agit pas toujours d'un fantôme. Il peut s'agir d'une présence plus terrible, plus déroutante et plus évanescente. C'est le cas de L'Image dans le tapis, qui est construit comme un roman policier dont le coupable se révèle être l'enquêteur lui-même, le malheureux narrateur, coupable d'être le seul sur la piste de cette mystérieuse présence et de laisser le crime s'accomplir, coupable enfin de faire d'une œuvre littéraire le cœur de son existence. James écrit ici une des plus belles, mais aussi une des plus honnêtes mystifications littéraires jamais données en pâture aux critiques dont il veut se venger. Mais l'auteur se prend au jeu et la plaisanterie devient une quête métaphysique.

L'Image dans le tapis

It had occurred to her early that in her position - that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie - she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively - though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered - to see any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men - the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the "sounder," which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.

Dans la Cage

Les Amis des amis Owen Wingrave la Vie privée (Bibliothèque de Babel, #8)

When the threat of poverty forces Kate Croy and Merton Densher to reconsider their engagement to one another, Kate becomes determined to find a solution. The answer comes in the form of Milly Theale, a rich, young American woman visiting London as a result of her failing health. With a dramatic plan to exploit Milly's wealth and her affection for Merton, Kate believes she will achieve all that she has hoped for. The subsequent unexpected and tragic consequences reveal the painful cost of her selfishness and the ultimate struggle for Milly to "achieve, however briefly and brokenly, the sense of having lived."Dramatizing the moral shift of the early 1900s, Henry James's The Wings of the Dove is today recognized as an American literary classic. Published in 1902, the novel has been adapted multiple times for both screen and stage, including the 1997 Academy Award nominated film of the same name. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Wings of the Dove twenty-sixth on its list of the best 100 English-Language novels of the twentieth century. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

The Wings Of The Dove

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L'élève

A very young woman's first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate...An estate haunted by a beckoning evil.Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls...But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil.For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.

Le Tour d'écrou

L'Autre maison

Henry James (Portrait de femme) n'a pas son pareil pour aller chercher au fond de ses personnages les sentiments qui les motivent dans leurs actes. Cousin et cousine, ce court et tragique roman, ne déroge pas à la règle et on se laisse embarquer dans la psychologie de Clément Serle, un personnage maladif venu des Etats-Unis pour finir sa vie dans l'Angleterre qu'il chérit, qui n'a que son élégance pour nous faire accepter son accablement. La rencontre avec sa cousine, sera pour lui comme une parenthèse, dans une descente inexorable vers une fin annoncée. Car nul ne va contre son destin !

Le dernier des Valerii ; the last of the Valerii

Résumé

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