SOURCE: “City for Expatriates,” in Yale French Studies, Vol. 32, 1964, pp. 144-158.

In the following excerpt, McMahon enumerates the reasons that individuals from different geographical locations of the United States removed themselves to Paris.

Poor Strether had at this very moment to recognize the truth that wherever one paused in Paris the imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up consequences till there was scarce room to pick one's steps among them.

—Henry James, The Ambassadors

Of Paris and the American writer two things may be said: first, the city most often has done him an immense amount of good; second, he has had remarkably little influence in shaping his public's idea of the French capital as anything more than a place where immense good is done to people who need it. When we raise...