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In short, this [the exchange of gifts] represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are.—Marcel Mauss,The Gift

Ajoutons que Paris est le séjour d'une colonie nombreuse d'étrangers qu'y appellent les affaires, le plaisir, l'étude, etc. que par ses collections, ses musées, ses bibliothèques, il se prête plus qu'aucune autre capitale aux travaux d'ensemble sur l'industrie, les sciences et les arts; que par l'urbanité de ses moeurs, par son hospitalité envers les étrangers, notre capitale a véritablement un caractère cosmopolite. 1 -Prince Napoléon, Rapport sur l'exposition universelle de 1855 (139) In this passage from his report to Napoléon III on the Exposition universelle of 1855, Prince Napoléon points to the cosmopolitan character of Paris as a reason for its suitability for future grandiose international exhibitions. There is, perhaps, a tension in his description between two facets of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism as urbane detachment and cosmopolitanism as openness towards strangers. This difference is not necessarily one between the bad and good faces of the cosmopolitan, since detachment is integral to critique. The positive quality of detachment is an argument made by Amanda Anderson in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment where she folds cosmopolitanism into a larger ideal of critical distance in Victorian aesthetic and intellectual projects about which many writers conveyed a complex ambivalence. One aim of her approach is to trace the dialectic between detachment and engagement for the Victorians, and defend the "progressive potentialities of systemic critique" about which much skepticism has arisen in the last twenty years of literary and cultural studies (31). In a similar vein, Rebecca L. Walkowitz proposes "critical cosmopolitanism" for the Modernists who display "an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume a consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen" (2). Her focus is more insistently on the aesthetic than Anderson's, for she argues that early Modernist innovations of style made possible the

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