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    Madame de Treymes
    Madame de Treymes
    Madame de Treymes
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Madame de Treymes

    By Edith Wharton

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1973
    Author

    Edith Wharton

    EDITH WHARTON (1862 - 1937) was a unique and prolific voice in the American literary canon. With her distinct sense of humor and knowledge of New York’s upper-class society, Wharton was best known for novels that detailed the lives of the elite including: The House of Mirth, The Custom of Country, and The Age of Innocence. She was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and one of four women whose election to the Academy of Arts and Letters broke the barrier for the next generation of women writers.

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    Reviews for Madame de Treymes

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      His sense of strangeness was increased by the surprise of his companion's next speech.You wish to marry my sister-in-law?" she asked abruptly; and Durham's start of wonder was followed by an immediate feeling of relief. He had expected the preliminaries of their interview to be as complicated as the bargaining in an Eastern bazaar, and had feared to lose himself at the first turn in a labyrinth of “foreign” intrigue.I started my year of reading Edith Wharton with this novella, first published in a magazine in 1906, because it was the only one of her books on the shelf last time I went to the library. The copy I read has large print, wide borders and several blank pages between chapters, and it's still a slim book that didn't take much more than an hour to read.The story is about a straightforward and honourable American man who wishes to marry the estranged American wife of an aristocratic Frenchman. Although long separated from her husband, Madame de Malrive is sure that her husband's family will find a way to prevent her from getting a divorce, even though as a Protestant is is not against her religion, and she enlists her sister-in-law Madame de Treymes to help persuade the rest of the family.It's not much of a spoiler to say that things do not go well for the protagonist. It is obvious from the beginning that the marriage will never happen, and the publishers of my book quote a review on the back cover that gives it away too. I think that the strength of this novella lies in the gloomy atmosphere and the weight of tradition and family hanging over Madame de Malrive, rather than the plot.
    • 5/5
      This novella of Edith Wharton's is a gem! In a mere 87 pages a saga unfolds. It is a saga of character, a saga of cultural identities clashing, and a saga of the meaning of love. Excellent!
    • 2/5
      I read this short novel (really a novella in spite of the fact that it has chapters) as an introduction to Edith Wharton's work. I chose poorly. The plot is interesting enough, concerning a gentleman who wants to marry an American woman living in Paris. The only problem is, she's separated from her current husband, and his family will not consent to a divorce so she can marry again. The novel is restrained, understated, and turn-of-the-century. And those are all bad things in this case. The characters make you feel like they are not real people -- that they are actors playing the part of characters in a book. If that sounds weird, it's on purpose. If you have never read Wharton before, this is not a good introduction to her work. If you have read and enjoyed other Wharton works, give this one a pass -- you haven't missed anything.

    Book preview

    Madame de Treymes - Edith Wharton

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Madame de Treymes, by Edith Wharton

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: Madame de Treymes

    Author: Edith Wharton

    Posting Date: August 8, 2009 [EBook #4518]

    Release Date: October, 2003

    First Posted: January 29, 2002

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAME DE TREYMES ***

    Produced by Charles Aldarondo. HTML version by Al Haines.

    MADAME DE TREYMES

    BY

    EDITH WHARTON

    MADAME DE TREYMES

    I

    John Durham, while he waited for Madame de Malrive to draw on her gloves, stood in the hotel doorway looking out across the Rue de Rivoli at the afternoon brightness of the Tuileries gardens.

    His European visits were infrequent enough to have kept unimpaired the freshness of his eye, and 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.

    But to-day, if the scene had never presented itself more alluringly, in that moist spring bloom between showers, when the horse-chestnuts dome themselves in unreal green against a gauzy sky, and the very dust of the pavement seems the fragrance of lilac made visible—to-day for the first time the sense of a personal stake in it all, of having to reckon individually with its effects and influences, kept Durham from an unrestrained yielding to the spell. Paris might still be—to the unimplicated it doubtless still was—the most beautiful city in the world; but whether it were the most lovable or the most detestable depended for him, in the last analysis, on the buttoning of the white glove over which Fanny de Malrive still lingered.

    The mere fact of her having forgotten to draw on her gloves as they were descending in the hotel lift from his mother's drawing-room was, in this connection, charged with significance to Durham. She was the kind of woman who always presents herself to the mind's eye as completely equipped, as made up of exquisitely cared for and finely-related details; and that the heat of her parting with his family should have left her unconscious that she was emerging gloveless into Paris, seemed, on the whole, to speak hopefully for Durham's future opinion of the city.

    Even now, he could detect a certain confusion, a desire to draw breath and catch up with life, in the way she dawdled over the last buttons in the dimness of the porte-cochere, while her footman, outside, hung on her retarded signal.

    When at length they emerged, it was to learn from that functionary that Madame la Marquise's carriage had been obliged to yield its place at the door, but was at the moment in the act of regaining it. Madame de Malrive cut the explanation short. I shall walk home. The carriage this evening at eight.

    As the footman turned away, she raised her eyes for the first time to Durham's.

    Will you walk with me? Let us cross the Tuileries. I should like to sit a moment on the terrace.

    She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot together over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she lived in—a knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of yellow-backed fiction—gave a thrilling significance to her naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the Park, the idea would have presented itself to her companion as agreeable but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive's suggestion that they should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with unspecified possibilities.

    He was so throbbing with the sense of these possibilities that he walked beside her without speaking down the length of the wide alley which follows the line of the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even, when they reached its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the steps to the terrace of the Feuillants. For, after all, the possibilities were double-faced, and her bold departure from custom might simply mean that what she had to say was so dreadful that it needed all the tenderest mitigation of circumstance.

    There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in his silence: it was a part of her long European discipline that she had learned to manage pauses with ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed this one with a random fluency; now she was content to let it widen slowly before them like the spacious prospect opening at their feet. The complicated beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace, touched him anew through her nearness, as with the hint of some vast impersonal power, controlling and regulating her life in ways he could not guess, putting between himself and her the whole width of the civilization into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there was such fear in the thought—he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset glories of the Arch—that all he had meant to say when he finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated: Well?

    She answered at once—as though she had only awaited the call of the national interrogation—I don't know when I have been so happy.

    So happy? The suddenness of his joy flushed up through his fair skin.

    As I was just now—taking tea with your mother and sisters.

    Durham's Oh! of surprise betrayed also a note of disillusionment, which she met only by the reconciling murmur: Shall we sit down?

    He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous to the spot, and placed them under the tree near which they had paused, saying reluctantly, as he did so: "Of course it was an immense pleasure to them to see

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