The association of modernism with expatriation and exile is venerable to the point of being a cliché; around a century after the fact, it might seem strange to revisit the issue now. It is my contention that certain recent developments, critical and historical, make it an especially opportune moment to do so, but it is also worth mentioning that from the inceptions of English-language modernism, exile, exoticism, and expatriation were already being mobilized precisely as cliché themselves. Thus Henry James, in his earliest notebook entries concerning what was to become The Ambassadors, already worries about the cliché of Paris he intends to employ, “I don't altogether like the banal side of the revelation of Paris—it's so obvious, so usual to make Paris the vision that opens his eyes, makes him feel his mistake” (Notebooks, 226) only to conclude later in the same entry “I'm afraid it must be Paris; if he's an American” (227). As James will put it in his preface, “There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of the human comedy, that people's moral scheme does break down in Paris … and that I came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the trivial association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which gave me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is so advertised” (Ambassadors, xxxvii–xxxviii). James will conclude that this vulgarity furthers his purpose, as “the likely place had the great merit of sparing me preparations” (xxxviii).