Edith Wharton and the Faubourg Saint-Germain: the diary of the Abbe Mugnier

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Anne Foata

R. W. B. Lewis, in his 1975 ground-breaking biography of Edith Wharton,(1) mentions the Abbe Mugnier, a curate at the Saint Thomas d'Aquin and Salute Clotilde parishes in Paris, who was to become a lifelong friend of the novelist. Both churches are located in the heart of the Seventh Arrondissement on the Left Bank of the French capital, which includes the Faubourg Saint-Germain section, the Parisian environment of the great hotels particuliers (town mansions) of the French aristocracy. The "Faubourg" (as it is more familiarly known) is the setting of Henry James's The American, where its haughty aloofness is epitomized by the old marquise de Bellegarde, and of parts of Wharton's own The Custom of the Country during the heroine's brief marriage to Count Raymond de Chelles.

The stronghold of the Legitimists (that is, the nobility of the ancien regime), the Faubourg in due time had opened up to the newer nobility of the Napoleon and Louis-Philippe regimes. It had also become home to the wealthy industrialists of the middle and late nineteenth century and, after the Franco-Prussian War, to some of the more prominent writers and artists.(2) Edith Wharton herself lived in its midst from 1900 to 1920, for short periods until 1911, and then on a more permanent basis after the sale of The Mount, her Lenox residence in western Massachusetts.

Wharton was introduced to the life of its salons by the French writer and Academician Paul Bourget and his American wife Minnie, the "Minnie-Pauls" as they appear in her letters and diaries until 1935, the year of Bourget's death. Wharton's social life in the Faubourg, which Lewis records with an eager relish for its aristocratic details, is quite staggering. Of keener interest, however, for Wharton scholars, is the number of her translators who were recruited amidst the Faubourg's literati and nobility.

On Bourget's suggestion, Charles du Bos, a friend of Andre Gide, translated The House of Mirth and, later, Ethan Frome. Gide himself, who had professed the greatest admiration for the latter work, was approached by Wharton for Summer but eventually declined, and du Bos did the translation (Lewis 398; see note 1). The Vicomte Robert d'Humieres, a friend of Marcel Proust, began work on The Custom of the Country, but he was killed at the front before he finished it (Lewis 382). The eminent literary critic and art historian Louis Gillet on his own initiative offered to translate A Mother's Recompense and, later, The Children, while one of his daughters, Louisette, busied herself with one of Wharton's longer stories or novellas (Lewis 485). The Comtesse Jane d'Oillamson, whom Wharton had first met when she was still married to the Prince de Polignac, translated "The Reckoning," "The Confessional," "Souls Belated," and other stories (Lewis 207, 212). Charles du Bos, it is true, had an English mother and was bilingual, and so undoubtedly was Jane d'Oillamson whose mother was American.

All these names, with the exception of Jane d'Oillamson and the addition of numerous others, many of which were to some degree or other known or familiar to Wharton, appear in the diary of the Abbe Mugnier, which was published in parts in 1985 under the title Le Journal de l'Abbe Mugnier (1879-1939)." The Abbe, as he was known to the end of his life despite the fact that he had been made a canon in 1925, knew about everybody.

He had been drawn into the milieu of the writers and artists in 1891 through his spiritual ministrations to the "decadent" author of A Rebours, J. K. Huysmans, whom he eventually converted to Roman Catholicism. As to the aristocrats, he started hearing the confessions of their footmen and parlor maids, went on with teaching the catechism to their sons and daughters, advised and comforted the wives, and ended up in their dining and drawing rooms.

Not that he was quite without misgivings about his intense dining out. "No priest has ever dined more about town than I," he confided to his diary on 29 January 1911; "I'm squandering my soul by platefuls." Another time he ruefully admitted to himself that he was rather the "marriage at Cana" type of priest than the "fast in the desert" type (10 April 1912). He was an avid reader of the classics, a lifelong enthusiast of Chateaubriand, and a great admirer of the music of Wagner. An untiring confidant of the gens du monde and gens de lettres, he did not, however, belong to the breed of the fashionable little society priests or court lackeys of eighteenth-century boudoir fiction. With his rather shabby soutane and heavy brogues, his somewhat rustic appearance alone would have denied the fact, had not his mores been as unimpeachable as was his manner toward the intellectuals and aristos of his flock. His unpretentiousness was genuine; so were his curiosity for all things human and his benevolence. All his friends, high and low, knew they could tap his considerable knowledge of, and compassion for, the human heart.

The Abbe's diary with its almost daily entries over 60 years spans what has been called la Belle Epoque - that is, the late nineteenth century that came to an abrupt halt in 1914, and the troubled years of the entre-deux-guerres, the period between the two world wars. The Mercure de France edition presents a mere selection of this vast material, which the Abbe left to the first of his two "adopted nieces," the niece premiere as he called her, the Comtesse Francois de Castries. The niece seconde or second niece by elective adoption, the Princesse Marthe Bibesco, published her own correspondence with the Abbe between 1951 and 1957,(4) and a memoir Le Confesseur et les Poetes(5) in 1970. A distant cousin of the poetess Anna de Noailles, a writer in her own right and noted socialite, the princess who was acquainted with Walter Berry may well have met Edith Wharton. Wharton's scholars might want to have a look at both works for possible references to their novelist.