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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Anne Foata

The Abbe Mugnier died at 91 years of age, a mere four months before the liberation of Paris in 1944. He had endured the hardships of no less than three major wars with one revolutionary upheaval as well (the Commune de Paris of 1871).

In his biography of Edith Wharton, Lewis first mentions a joint attendance by both the Abbe and the novelist at a social event on 13 April 1908. It is recorded as a random example of Wharton's social calendar for that day (Lewis 212). The Abbe Mugnier may have likewise made a note of the dinner at the Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James's, but if so, the entry. for that day or the next does not figure in the printed edition. Nor does Wharton's name, by the way, in the entries of those early years of her sojourns in Paris. She appears for the first time in it in the entry for 21 April 1915, together with her beloved friend Walter Berry, and both of them are mentioned again in the entry for 13 August of the same year. There are three entries for 1918 (7 and 9 February and 22 March), where they figure together with that other dear friend of Wharton's, Bernard Berenson. All three are mentioned again in the entries for October 1923 (Wharton and Berenson on the 11th, Wharton and Berry on the 16th). There is one last entry on 24 July 1924, with all three of them, before Wharton's name and Berenson's disappear definitively. Walter Berry, who had been mentioned on his own on five occasions (25 June 1917, 17 April and 27 November 1918, 19 February and 17 October 1921) appears one last time on 11 June 1927, a few months before his death. We see him rescuing a bewildered Abbe from the private showing of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis and driving him home to his rooms at the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph de Cluny on the rue Mechain.

A total of eight entries refer to Edith Wharton, eleven to Walter Berry and eight to Bernard Berenson, several of them, as we have seen, common to all two or three of them. These I will venture to translate from the French, for the benefit of those Wharton scholars who may be interested in catching an echo of Wharton's "whirligig life," as James is reported to have called the latter's flurry of activity (Lewis 318). Numerous entries of the Abbe's Journal refer at some length to Charles du Bos and Paul Bourget who were close friends of Wharton, in addition to writers such as Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Anna de Noailles, Paul Valery, and others who, without being intimate, were frequent visitors at Wharton's various residences or were co-guests at the houses of her friends. A generous listing of the members of the French aristocracy and of their salons that Wharton frequented can also be culled from it.

A notable silence on the Abbe's part, however, and a missed opportunity on Wharton's come to light in the pages of the diary, at least in its printed version. They concern Henry James with respect to the Abbe and Marcel Proust with respect to Wharton.

Of course, on the Abbe's part it may well be that the entries recording an acquaintance with James were omitted in the printed edition of the Journal. We know how profusely James was wined, dined, and teaed by all Wharton's friends on his visits to Paris (e.g., Lewis 216). But then no entry of the diary mentions Wharton herself before 21 April 1915 and by that date the ailing James no longer came to Paris. Still, James's absence from the Journal, except for the mere mention of his authorship of the biography of the American sculptor W. W. Story and a passing remark on his style, is a disappointment. The Abbe's candid impressions of the rotund, magisterial, elderly James would have been gratifying.