This post originally appeared on Murder Is Everywhere.
In a few weeks, I head off on a trip to the south of France. Just Tony and me, I thought—but a tagalong friend has become part of the planning.
This friend is a writer I greatly admire: the late Edith Wharton. Obviously, Edith Wharton and I haven’t met. But I call her friend because I see in her writing and wanderlust my own longings and occasionally, a sharing of humor or pain.
Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862 and died in 1937. She first visited France when she was four years old and spending time on the Continent with her wealthy parents. She sailed back to France on frequent visits after marrying Teddy Wharton in 1885. This marriage dissolved, first as a separation in 1911 followed by a divorce in 1913, on the grounds of Teddy’s embezzlement of her trust fund to support his mistress. Many of her books set in France have middle-aged American characters who are divorced and have complicated situations such as faraway children and the dubious chances for remarriage or acceptance back to their original families. These themes present in Madame de Treymes and A Son at the Front. The most powerful and heartbreaking of her France books that I’ve read—because she has 12-plus French books and stories, I have a way to go—is The Mother’s Recompense, a tragic novel about Anne Clephane, an American woman living in Nice, where she’s fled after a painful divorce that granted her ex-husband sole custody of her daughter. After Anne’s ex’s death and her estranged daughter’s coming to adulthood, she’s invited by her daughter to return to New York, where she learns of the terrible coincidence that her daughter is planning to marry Anne’s former lover, Chris Fenno—an artist-turned-war hero, fourteen years younger than Anne, who vanished from her life. This novel is the very definition of romantic suspense with twists and turns as Anne struggles with whether to tell her daughter or not.
Wharton’s Paris and South of France for exiles in the early 1900s is beautiful, privileged, and a kind of alternate reality for rule-bound Anglo-Saxons to explore. Edith praised the French people for many virtues. In French Ways and Their Meaning, I chuckled at reading: “The French physiognomy, if not vividly beautiful, is vividly intelligent; but the long practice of manners has so veiled its keenness with refinement as to produce a blending of vivacity and good temper nowhere else to be matched.”
Yes, based on my short experience, I do like French people!
Edith rented a gracious townhouse in the 7th arondissement of Paris, the capital city where she volunteered and raised funds for relief for the WWI soldiers and their impoverished families. She also spent years in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, a few miles north of the city, where in 1918, she bought and restored a magnificent house called Colombe and its gardens.
In the 1920s, she bought a winter residence in Hyéres, in the Var region of Southern France, not far from the Riviera. This home, Castel Sainte-Claire, was a place where she could escape the cold winds of winter and relax with an entirely new social circle, many of them foreign writers and artists.
During Edith’s thirty-plus years in France, she wrote dozens of books yet still attended and held parties, especially literary salons which had guests as famous as her old pal Henry James, the lawyer who served as her muse, Water Berry, and Marcel Proust. She also made touristic trips regularly by motor car, which in the early 1900s meant traveling without a roof or windshield. Car travel was for the hardy, although she always had a chauffeur, maid, and friends along. Some of these driving capers included her dear friend Henry James, although he is never named in A Motor Flight Through France, a travel guide published in 1908 that competed with hundreds of other tour guides for English-speakers interested in France. In the photo below, Edith is motoring with her husband Teddy and friend Henry James (in the United States).
After World War I was over and transatlantic tourism resumed, Edith penned French Ways and Their Meaning, a highly-opinionated primer on what to look for beyond the sights, and inside the people. This was certainly the book that made me smile the most—often in amusement at her strong opinions on feminism and of the United States. Yes, even though she was urging people to come to France, she was also letting loose on what in America made her want to leave.
As I pack my suitcase, my anticipation rises. I hope that Edith’s France is still there for me to explore. I envision myself in Nice, stepping out of a hôtel particulier onto the Promenade des Anglais: “The glare of the promenade, where the top-knots of struggling palms swam on the wind like chained and long-finned sea-things against that sapphire wall climbing half way up to the sky.”
Edith loved gardens, and she equally adored beautiful small towns and large, old cities. In multiple works, she laments the industrial building landscape of New York and Boston, comparing it with superior France. In French Ways and Their Meaning, she speaks of “taste” as “…the reason, for instance, why the French have beautiful stone quays along the great rivers on which their cities are built, and why noble monuments of architecture and gardens and terraces have been built along these quays. The French have always felt and reverenced the beauty of their rivers, and known the value, artistic and hygienic, of a beautiful and well-kept river-front in the heart of a crowded city.”
In the novel Madame de Treymes, an American businessman, John Durham, finds unexpected emotion in landscape. “He was always struck anew by the vast and consummately ordered spectacle of Paris: by its look of having been boldly and deliberately planned as a background for the enjoyment of life, instead of being forced into grudging concessions to the festive instincts, or barricading itself against them in unenlightened ugliness, like his own lamentable New York.”
John Durham has fallen in love with Madame Fanny de Melrive, a friend from childhood days who’s now an unhappily-married American lady with a half-French son and a philandering French husband. She longs for a divorce. In his efforts to marry her, John runs up against the formidable in-laws in the form of a spokesman sister-in-law, Madame de Treymes. Madame de Treymes is tiny and dark and more than formidable, embodying another of Wharton’s beliefs: that French women are powerful players in society, even without being equals under the law. This was a controversial concept to put forward during the time of growing feminism in the US and England, which she denounces in French Ways and Their Meaning as being mostly women talking to each other. She has no time for the fact that women were being kept out of colleges and professional societies, so this couldn’t happen.
She points out that since the 1600s, French women had been involved in intellectual conversations with men at dinners, parties, and intellectual salons, and because of this, they enjoy more freedom and life satisfaction. She wrote about how upper-class women have played a role in France’s political movements, society building, the arts, and when it comes to common women, they share the operation of family businesses, serving as sales managers, bookkeepers, and the like. Furthermore, her declaration that throughout history, French women often held true friendships with men meant that their husbands were mindful to treat their wives very well, so as not to lose favor. In general, she sees French women as “grown up,” describing it this way:
“If then, being ‘grown up’ consists in having a larger and more liberal experience of life, in being less concerned with trifles, and less afraid of strong feelings, passions, and risks, then the French woman is distinctly more grown up than her American sister; and she is so because she plays a much more interesting and lively part in men’s lives.” She acknowledged that romantic affairs existed along with friendships, more strongly in her fiction than in her travel nonfiction. Below, Edith is picnicking with her beloved friend, Walter Berry, who also spent many years near her in both countries.
“Grown-up” is one of Edith’s favorite adjectives, and the compliment extends to the country’s national character—especially with respect to their honesty, and long-honed appreciation of culture. She also admires French taste, talking about how French statues sit just within an alcove in grand church architecture; there are no accidents of scale. French people have a “seeing eye” and are an “artistic race” as opposed to the British, who are excellent at writing, and appreciate art from Greece, Italy and France.
As mentioned earlier, it seemed impossible for Edith to refrain from being critical of the wealthy Americans she saw in Paris and the South of France. And this is just as much fun to read today as it might have been one hundred years ago. The Mother’s Recompense tallies up the cluster of mature women who meet at their “social nucleus,” an American rectory:
They were all there: the American Consul’s wife, mild, plump and irreproachable; the lovely Mrs. Prentiss of San Francisco, who “took things” and had been involved in a drug scandal; the Comtesse de Sainte Maxime, who had been a Loach of Philadelphia, and had figured briefly on the operatic stage; the Consul’s sister, who dressed like a flapper, and had been engaged during the war to a series of American officers, all of whom seemed to have given her celluloid bangles; and a pale Mrs. Marsh, who used to be seen about with a tall tired man called “the Colonel”, whose family-name was not Marsh, but for whom she wore mourning when he died, explaining—somewhat belatedly—that he was a cousin. Lastly, there was Mrs. Fred Langly of Albany, whose husband was “wanted” at home for misappropriation of funds, and who, emerging from the long seclusion consequent on this unfortunate episode, had now blossomed into a “prominent war-worker”, while Mr. Langly devoted himself to the composition of patriotic poems…
All these things, whispered in confidence, reimagined to protect the guilty when Edith lay in her soft bed, writing.
Raised in a conservative old-money family from New York—the elite people who built high society before the Vanderbilts showed up—Edith had led a stultifying, if scandal-free, life. She positively reveled in the freedoms of France. As she says in French Ways and Their Meaning:
“Because the French write and talk freely about subjects and situations that Anglo-Saxons, for the last one hundred years (and not before) have agreed not to mention, it is assumed that the French gloat over such subjects and situations. As a matter of fact, they simply take them for granted, as part of the great parti-coloured business of life, and no more gloat over them (in the morbid introspective sense) than gloat over their morning coffee.
“To be sure, they do ‘gloat’ over their coffee in a sense unknown to consumers of liquid chicory and health beverages: they ‘gloat,’ in fact, over everything that tastes good, looks beautiful, or appeals to any one of their acute and highly-trained five senses.”
Based on my reading of Edith Wharton, here’s my to-do list for my trip to the South of France.
Check out French towns from a boat on the Mediterranean, in order to properly regard buildings and monuments.
Attend an expat gathering, knowing all the while that the people may have committed sins in the US they’re not talking about.
Prepare for the French correcting me, because they are being honest, and I need to know.
Gloat with gusto over the café créme, croissants, and everything else.