How it opens
Every year, in June, you went to Venice, and every year the name of Jeffrey Aspern went with you.
He had been dead ninety years, and he had been the greatest poet America produced, and you had made him your trade.
Mrs. PrestMiss Bordereau is a hundred and five if she is a day, and she lives in a decaying palazzo with her niece.
Mrs. PrestShe was Juliana Rowport when Jeffrey Aspern wrote to her, and she has never parted with a letter in her life.
Choose
Ask her how she can be sure the papers still exist.
Ask what sort of woman the niece is.
Ask whether anyone has ever tried to buy the papers.