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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Anne Foata

19 The Prince and Princess Bassiano had a literary salon at Versailles, where Wharton was a frequent guest after she moved to St. Brice. Lewis writes (439) that she reencountered Andre Gide there and that it was at the Bassianos' that she first met Paul Valery, who then came periodically to visit her, both at St. Brice and at her Chateau Sainte-Claire in Hyeres on the Mediterranean.

20 The painter (1885-1956) who (almost) never painted the noses of her models. She frequented the painters of the Bateau Lavoir in Paris (cf. her picture "Apollinaire and his friends") and was the poet Apollinaire's companion for a while.

21 The Comtesse de Chevigne is assumed to be the model for Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes, but so is also the Comtesse Greffulhe.

22 The Princess Helene Soutzo, nee Chrissoveloni, was to marry the writer Paul Morand in 1927.

23 Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942) was not only the fashionable portrait painter we know from his portraits of Henry James, Proust, Cocteau, Gide, and others, he was also an art critic and a memorialist of his time (Propos dans l'Atelier, Cahiers d'un Artiste). Wharton was a frequent guest at his villa in Passy (Paris) and his manor house at Offranville in Normandy.

24 A writer and journalist (1883-1968) who turned to politics and became minister of education during the Vichy regime. He was sentenced to death after the war but had the sentence reduced to 10 years of banishment. He is not to be confused with the painter Pierre Bonnard.

25 Maurice Barres (1862-1923), a writer and politician, a staunch supporter of nationalistic views and of the war against Germany. The Abbe Mugnier's Journal mentions him as many as 81 times from 1891 on. He had a short affair with Anna de Noailles, and there was a nasty scandal over the suicide of his nephew Charles Demange in 1909.

26 The Count and Countess Etienne de Beaumont, in their town house on the rue Duroc, and the Vicount and Vicountess Charles de Noailles in theirs at 3, Place des Etats-Unis (which was once Wharton's brother Harry's residence and on occasions her own), were the patrons of the artists during the "Annees Folles" (the "Roaring Twenties") in France. They participated in many of the surrealists' pranks and sponsored many of Jean Cocteau's films and plays. The Abbe mentions the scandal around Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet at the Noailles's, the viewing of which was hastily canceled on the very night of its scheduled projection with the Abbe's attendance (on 17 November 1930, according to the Abbe's diary).

27 The French painter (1684-1721) of the Fetes Galantes (The Embarkment for Cythera, Gilles, etc.).

28 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German archaeologist and art historian (1707-68), the advocate of a return to the simplicity of Greek art, which opened the way to neoclassicism in literature and the arts.

29 Natalie Barney was "the highly cultivated Ohio-born woman who presided over a cult of Lesbos and a high-powered literary salon in rue Jacob," to steal Lewis's own definition (407). It seems that Wharton made a point of staying clear of her, although Lewis mentions a lunch in Walter Berry's apartment "in the fall of 1926" where they were co-guests (Lewis 444). The Abbe Mugnier appears not to have shared Wharton's reluctance, and Berenson was one of her gentlemen friends.