Holmes attributed the remark "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris" to "one of the wittiest of men". Later writers have attributed the saying to friend and fellow Saturday Club member Thomas Gold Appleton. In 1859, Ralph Waldo Emerson, also a member of that club, recorded in one of his journals, "T. Appleton says, that he thinks all Bostonians, when they die, if they are good, go to Paris." Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (1982), p. 486. Neither sentence has been found in the published writings of Appleton, but the remark may have been made in the presence of Holmes and Emerson. Oscar Wilde used the Holmes version in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), p. 75 (Complete Works, vol. 4, 1923), and A Woman of No Importance (1893), p. 180 (Complete Works, vol. 7, 1923).
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
“Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.”
John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877) American historian and diplomat
Quoted from Motley's conversation by his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1858), ch. 6, p. 143.
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”
Thomas Gold Appleton (1812–1884) American artist
Quoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), ch. 6.
“When good Americans die, they go to Paris"
"Where do bad Americans go?"
"They stay in America”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Act I.
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Context: Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
Karen Chance American writer
Source: Embrace the Night
“A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist
Eyes and Ears (1862)
Miscellany
