When Christopher Newman, the main character in Henry James's The American (1877), first strolls into the Louvre's Salon Carré, his presence there has no ramifications for art history. However, in a modest manner, his ensuing activities will add a dimension to the development of American fiction, since his story is among the first dealing with the adventures of an American abroad. Yet Newman's most important impact will not be precisely in the area of literary aesthetics. Rather, his experiences or, more properly, the experiences which his creator affords him, will have an influence in the broader realm of Franco-American cultural history. In the personage of Christopher Newman, Henry James created an enduring image of the American in Paris, an image, as will be seen, greatly indebted to Alexis de Tocqueville's De la démocratie en Amérique (1835). What proved to be a creation more specific to James is the image of the French, negative in the extreme, which would come to have a broad currency in the American imagination. These two images of the American and the French person, simplistic in both instances, were nevertheless destined to persist with several permutations right up to the end of the twentieth-century. Yet the irony regarding James's portrayals of Americans abroad and, to a much greater degree, his depictions of the French, is that neither image was based in any significant way on James's experiences with Americans in Paris or any group of French people who might by whatever standard be considered typical. What instigated the development of these representations and provided in large measure the impetus for the writing of The American was an experience James had in the theater in 1876.