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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Anne Foata

11 Walter Berry's residence at the time was 14, rue Saint-Guillaume, a street perpendicular to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He was to take up the lease of Wharton's apartment at 53, rue de Varenne, when she moved to St. Brice in 1920.

12 Perhaps the Comtesse Melanie de Pourtales, whose salon was located on the rue Tronchet, outside the Faubourg. She was the wife of a Lutheran banker of Swiss origin and had been a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III. Wharton had met her in the early 1880s at Cannes on the French Riviera when she was a young girl, and then later in Paris during her bouts of socializing in the winter of 1908 (Lewis 195). Mme. de Pourtales had died the previous year. It may also be the Comtesse Jacqueline who frequently entertained the Abbe or the Comtesse Helene.

13 R. W. B. Lewis mentions Alfred de Saint-Andre as a frequent guest or co-guest of Wharton's, who became a "regular" like the Bourgets, the du Boses, or the Comtesse de Fitz-James. He describes him as "a man of no visible achievements" but "a great gourmet and a connoisseur of out-of-the-way restaurants" (Lewis 196-97).

14 Mac Lugan must be Eric Maclagan, another "regular" of Wharton's set. The head of the British Ministry of Information bureau in Paris, he was attached to the British Peace Delegation in 1919, and later became the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Lewis 408, 476). He was another fine gourmet and discoverer of little restaurants, and also "a skilled raconteur of bawdy stories" (says Lewis), two qualities one would not basically expect from the son of an archbishop (his father, William Maclagan, had been the Archbishop of York).

15 Gide and Wharton had met in connection with the American Hostels for Refugees that Wharton had established at the very onset of the war. Gide became a member of the Franco-American General Committee of which Wharton was the chairperson. They eventually became friends, and the two of them had spent several days in the company of each other in and around Hyeres (on the Mediterranean in Provence) in the late fall of 1915 (Lewis 372). They saw each other regularly during the 1920s.

16 One would think of the composer of the opera Louise (1900), Gustave Charpentier (1860-1957), but he may also be the publisher referred to in a later entry of the Journal (for 19 February 1925), to whom the novelist Alphonse Daudet would send letters of recommendation for young aspiring writers, adding a secret code for his correspondent not to act on them.

17 Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) wrote a number of novels and comedies in his short paroxystic life, quite a few around the central farcical character of the tyrant Ubu (an avatar of one of his secondary school teachers). The opening of Ubu Roi on 10 December 1896 had been a stormy affair.

18 An old Cistercian abbey on the northern confines of Burgundy founded in 1114. The remaining buildings served as a kind of retreat for writers and intellectuals after the war under the aegis of Paul Desjardins (1859-1940). Lewis mentions one such visit of Wharton's during a motor trip to Nohant (George Sand's chateau in the central region of Berry) with Walter Berry in the early 20s. She found herself at lunch in the company of Gide, du Bos, Andre Maurois, and Lytton Strachey talking about the art of translation (Lewis 455-56).