Edith Wharton in France

By Claudine Lesage

Using previously unexamined and untranslated French sources, Claudine Lesage has illuminated the intertwined characters and important relationships of Wharton’s French life. The bulk of the new material comes from the daybooks of Paul and Minnie Bourget; Wharton’s letters (in French) to Léon Bélugou; and the author’s personal research in Hyères. Highlights include letters used in Wharton’s divorce proceedings and a mysterious autobiographical essay written by Wharton’s lover Morton Fullerton. Most significantly, Wharton’s friendship with Bélugou, absent from most Wharton biographies, is, for the first time, fully recounted through their extensive intimate correspondence.

The year 1907 was a milestone in Edith Wharton’s life and work. Unlike Joseph Conrad, who had, virtually overnight, forsaken his native land for an adopted one, Mrs. Wharton’s transition required several years of shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic. At first, all of Europe beckoned to her, but, from 1907 on, Wharton would claim Paris and, after the war, the French countryside as her home. All the while, her work, long regarded as being exclusively American, followed a similar trajectory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prospecta Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781632260949

Claudine Lesage

The French author Claudine Lesage, née Holuigue, was born in 1943. She obtained a Ph.D. in English Literature at Amiens in 1987, specializing in the works of Joseph Conrad. Lesage published several books about Conrad: La maison de Thérèse (1992), Joseph Conrad et le Continent (2003), and translations of his works: Le Forban (2005), Du goût des voyages (2007), and Coeur des Ténèbres (2009). In 1989, while researching Conrad at the library of the Côte d’Azur town of Hyères, Lesage discovered an unsigned manuscript that appeared to be an early work of Edith Wharton. After studying the manuscript, Lesage determined it was an unpublished account of Wharton’s 1888 Mediterranean cruise aboard the private yacht, The Vanadis. After publishing the journal as The Cruise of the Vanadis, Lesage probed further into Wharton’s work and her life, concentrating on the American writer’s French years. Lesage translated several Wharton short stories; edited Lettres a l'ami Francais (2001); and authored Edith Wharton en France (2011). Dr. Lesage died in 2013 before she could publish her final manuscript, a work on Wharton’s life in France intended for an American audience.

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Dedicated to Jean-Claude Lesage, Claudine’s husband, for his patience and generosity of spirit in bringing this work to completion.

Never have I felt as much as I do today just how much I love France and my French friends. It breaks my heart not to be able to prove it by rushing home to Paris.

—Edith Wharton to Léon Bélugou, Tring, England, September 8, 1914

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Author’s Note to the Reader

PART I: Parisianizing

Introduction

CHAPTER 1: From Newport to Paris (1893–1908)

CHAPTER 2: In Full Confidence (1908–1909)

CHAPTER 3 : Taking the Faubourg (1910–1911)

CHAPTER 4: Wharton vs. Wharton (1909–1913)

CHAPTER 5: The End of Illusions (1912–1913)

CHAPTER 6: Morton Fullerton, Self-Portrait (1913)

CHAPTER 7: War in Motion (1914–1918)

PART II: Countrifying

Introduction

Photo Gallery

CHAPTER 8: The Two Gardens (1918–1924)

CHAPTER 9: Retracing Her Steps (1925–1929)

CHAPTER 10: The Furies (1929–1937)

Epilogue

Biographical Index and Glossary

Archives and Sources

Unpublished or Private Collections

Selected Bibliography

Index

Photo Gallery

Paul Bourget, taken during his tour of the United States, 1894.

Bourget at his home in Paris, looking at a map of America.

Minnie Bourget with Paul Bourget (on left) and Teddy Wharton (on right) at Le Plantier, the Bourgets’ home, Hyères, 1904.

Teddy and Nicette, the Whartons’ Papillion, on an upper terrace at Le Plantier, 1904.

Paul, Minnie, and Teddy in the Whartons’ car, in front of the chapel at Le Plantier, 1904. On the left is Charles Cook, the Whartons’ chauffeur..

Léon Bélugou in colonial dress, Paris.

Léon Bélugou, Reims, 1914.

Léon Bélugou and his unidentified belle at the Front, 1914.

William Morton Fullerton, circa 1909.

Page from the Self-Portrait manuscript Bélugou requested Fullerton write in 1913.

Morton Fullerton in his office, rue Vignon, Paris, 1903. Photo inscribed to André Godfernaux.

Armand de Gramont, duc de Guiche, during WW1, circa 1915.

Léon Bélugou, rue Blanche, Paris, 1919.

Bélugou (left) and de Guiche at Villa Mon-Rêve, Bénerville-sur-Mer.

Pavillon Colombe, Wharton’s home in Sainte-Brice-sous-Fôret, purchased in 1919.

The drawing room at Pavillon Colombe.

Edith Wharton in her Pavillon Colombe garden, 1934.

Workmen mending the front wall of Pavillon Colombe.

A view of the gardens.

Château Sainte-Claire, Edith Wharton’s home from 1920 to her death in 1937.

Wharton on the terrace of Sainte-Claire, circa 1932.

Drawing room at Sainte-Claire.

Postcard of Wharton’s library at Sainte-Claire that she sent to Léon Bélugou, dated January 3, 1931.

Arched cypresses and mandarin orange trees led to a pavilion off the Sainte-Claire terrace.

Path up toward the old tower, lined with flowers and shrubs of contrasting textures and shapes.

Terrace pathway lined with lemon trees.

Garden view at Sainte-Claire before the great frost of 1920.

Unidentified figure in the gardens of Sainte-Claire.

Staff at Sainte-Claire: head gardener Victor Palazzi on the far left, and cook Marie Dalfin, on the right.

The gardens and grounds crew at Sainte-Claire (described in Chapter 10).

Victor Palazzi on left next to Claire Cuvit (a maid) holding Linky, Wharton’s favorite Pekingese.

Victor Palazzi carrying flower pots on his head.

Paul Valéry, his wife, and Robert Norton (on far right) swimming at Giens Peninsula, Hyères, circa 1920s.

Watercolor of Wharton’s Pekingese Linky by Robert Norton, gifted by the author’s family to The Mount.

Elisina Tyler inherited Sainte-Claire after Wharton’s death in 1937.

Germaine Ficq, Tyler’s house manager, sitting in the garden at Sainte-Claire. Ficq married head gardener Victor Palazzi in 1939.

Last known photograph of Edith Wharton at Pavillon Colombe, taken shortly before her death on August 11, 1937.

Foreword

I first met Claudine Lesage in 2011 on a trip to Hyères, and was struck by her enthusiasm for Edith Wharton, which crossed the divides of language and culture. Throughout her career, Claudine advocated for a greater appreciation of Wharton among the French, and for more study among English-speaking scholars of Wharton’s French years. This manuscript, written through Claudine’s final illness, arose from her fierce determination to finish her story of Edith Wharton in France.

Using previously unexamined and untranslated French sources, Claudine has illuminated the intertwined characters and important relationships of Wharton’s French life. The bulk of the new material comes from the daybooks of Paul and Minnie Bourget; Wharton’s letters (in French) to Léon Bélugou; and the author’s personal research in Hyères. Highlights include letters used in Wharton’s divorce proceedings and a mysterious autobiographical essay written by Wharton’s lover Morton Fullerton. Most significantly, Wharton’s friendship with Bélugou, absent from most Wharton biographies, is, for the first time, fully recounted through their extensive intimate correspondence.

With her innate knowledge of French culture, Claudine was able to examine Wharton’s degree of success in penetrating the highest levels of French society. Initially skeptical of Wharton’s ability to become French, Claudine’s work ultimately portrays a woman who fashioned a French home of her own making; one who found a sense of belonging at her beloved Château Sainte-Claire.

In his Preface, Claudine’s husband, Jean-Claude Lesage, hails his wife as a literary archaeologist, who searched for answers in new and different places. Claudine, he said, had found Wharton’s spirit and soul in the gardens of the Château Sainte-Claire. For Claudine’s life’s work, and her passion, we are grateful. I have had the privilege of serving as editor of her nearly completed manuscript and have tried to remain faithful to her voice and vision for this book.

—Susan Wissler, Executive Director, The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home

Editor’s note: Since Claudine’s death in 2013, some clarity has been lost on her archival material. Despite our efforts, some citations, regrettably, are incomplete or unconfirmed.

Preface

Although I was not the author of this research on Edith Wharton, I was the witness, and I would simply like to explain here the origin of my wife’s passion for the American novelist.

The motive for one’s interest sometimes depends on fortuitous circumstances. We regularly passed our summers in the town of Hyères, Provence, and our accommodations on the rue Edith Wharton, situated at the entrance of the medieval city, made it so that the American novelist became a center of interest that never ceased. This was the starting point of the meeting between Claudine Lesage and Madame Wharton.

Our walks led us through the winding streets of the old town to the villa Sainte-Claire, where Wharton once lived. We would pass the Church of St. Paul and its belvedere, to the shaded benches of the villa’s terrace to enjoy the vista of the Îles d’Or drowned in the summer mist. It was a haven of serenity away from the crowds of bathers where one was inclined to whisper so as not to disturb the peacefulness of the place.

Claudine was fascinated by this American woman who had devoted herself to a place then wild and uncultivated, who had acquired an estate that stood at the walls of the old castle, and, with the help of an armada of gardeners, had created a vast Mediterranean garden. When Claudine walked the grounds, she was acutely aware of the imprint of its previous owner; a presence still felt floating on the hillside and among the plantings—the soul of Mrs. Wharton. Could she hope to meet a few people who may have known the American?

To gain a more intimate knowledge of the novelist’s work, Claudine included Edith Wharton in her Anglo-American literature course at the University of Picardie in Amiens where she taught. Her previous study on Joseph Conrad’s youth in Provence had already familiarized Claudine with Hyères, with its institutions and academics. Her discovery of the manuscript of The Cruise of the Vanadis at the municipal library further stoked her interest in Wharton.

Claudine was a field woman, an archaeologist of literature, who had no equal. She would dig up source texts, reading the strata of their creation, finding answers to her questions. Other meticulously kept source materials were rich in discoveries: of Léon Bélugou, a scholar and tutor of the upper-class families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who frequently corresponded with the novelist while she lived in Paris. Then there were those of the writer Paul Bourget and his wife, Minnie, owners of Le Plantier, an estate on the hill of Costebelle in Hyères. They were among Edith’s intimates, and Minnie’s diary is the echo of this beautiful friendship.

Thus a vision of Edith Wharton’s French years is offered, here, by a meticulous researcher, full of empathy for the American novelist, and in consideration of the French Background.

Claudine left us as she concluded the last pages of her manuscript, certain to the end of the importance of bringing the sum of her research to the American readers of Wharton. This project is being accomplished today through the friendship of Susan Wissler, Executive Director of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home, in Lenox, Massachuseets, and Jonas Dovydenas, who understood, always, the value of this research.

Let them be warmly thanked.

—Jean-Claude Lesage

Author’s Note to the Reader

Many biographies have been written about Edith Wharton’s life. The first of these, Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947), by Percy Lubbock, was published not long after her death. The most acclaimed is R. W. B. Lewis’s Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize. More recently, Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton (2007) sums up all its predecessors in an account teeming with accumulated details. However, the only traits shared by all the biographies published to this day are an English-speaking author and a distinctly Anglo-American point of view—a strangely persistent feature, considering that half of Edith Wharton’s life (if not more) was spent in Europe, and the better part of her adult years were lived in France. Of course, all of her biographers take this latter fact into account, but they do so from an outsider’s perspective, so that anything involving France is presented without the deep knowledge that comes from belonging to a country from birth, a knowledge found in the very fiber of one’s being. As her French friends would often attest, this flaw was also found in Edith when it came to her positions and feelings toward France.

Since so much has already been written, it follows that this attempt at a new biography need not start from scratch in the telling of her life, but rather, should approach it from a different angle: viewing matters from a French perspective and relying on many hitherto untapped resources still to be found in France. Thus, this author’s approach has consisted first in locating all of the documentation that has been unknown or unavailable to English-language biographers by virtue of its very Frenchness.

The first find was an unpublished and unknown text: Wharton’s travel journal from a Mediterranean cruise taken in 1888. Entitled The Cruise of the Vanadis, it was quietly published (as La Croisière du Vanadis) for the first time by Presses de l’UFR CLERC, Université de Picardie, in 1992, and edited by this author.

The second compendium of documents consisted of correspondence between Léon Bélugou (a lifelong friend of Wharton’s lover Morton Fullerton) and Mrs. Wharton, found in the home of Bélugou’s daughter Madame Lucienne Bélugou Minot, who had known Wharton as a child and was a scrupulous curator of all of her father’s papers, including this remarkable collection of letters. This correspondence, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, provides both sides of the communications, Bélugou having kept the drafts of his own letters. The remaining Bélugou papers have still other secrets to reveal, namely on the subjects of Morton Fullerton and Teddy Wharton, not to mention the important and inconsequential members of the Parisian circle with whom Edith Wharton and Bélugou ran.

Another wealth of archives belonged to Admiral Gérard Daille. This priceless resource included the photos and the daybooks of Minnie and Paul Bourget. The daybooks are now at the Fels Library of the Catholic University of Paris. But who would ever have suspected that the Edith whose name so often graced their pages was none other than Edith Wharton, and that a new account of her daily life in France could be hidden within?

This author’s final research focused on Hyères and took several different forms: delving into the archives of the notary Maître Boudry; unearthing photographs, books, and furniture in private homes; reviewing the papers, literary collections, and other mementos preserved by Germaine Ficq, who knew Mrs. Wharton; and concluding with a review of the registers of foreigners still, miraculously, on file in the basement of the Hyères police headquarters.

Still, an accumulation of archival materials is not, in and of itself, revealing. It all had to be placed in its proper French context, all the while keeping the new material as new as possible. That is, the aim was never to transcribe the recently discovered information in a totally narrative form, much less a novelistic one. Wharton’s correspondence with Bélugou has been presented as is, simply translated from French, formatted and with a bit of context provided. The Bourgets’ journals, on the other hand, which alternate between mind-numbing precision and frustrating vagueness, required a bit more synthesizing. The Hyères documents were summarized, with quotations and translations from the original texts provided where possible. As in any biography, the story follows a timeline, only in this case there are gaps that this author’s point of view cannot bridge and that have been deliberately left unfilled. Any borrowing from existing biographies was done with the sole intention of giving greater clarity and consistency to the text.

As to certain of the ancillary materials—the endnotes, the sources and archives, the biographical index and glossary, and the photographs—they are included to expand and enrich the reader’s understanding of Mrs. Wharton’s life in France. The sources and archives utilized by this author testify to the doggedness of those daughters, nephews, friends, and curators who believed that someday they would serve some unforeseen purpose. Last but not least, the photographs were selected largely on the criteria of their novelty—many of them being new material never before published in the United States.

Part I

Parisianizing

Returning from Cairo to Paris, Walter Berry wrote to his friend Monsieur de Margerie, that Parisianizing occupied the best part of his time. The verbal construction, now obsolete, was an upper-class expression of the time. Nevertheless, it aptly summarizes Edith Wharton’s Paris years, which she spent diligently Parisianizing.

Introduction

The year 1907 was a milestone in Edith Wharton’s life and work. Unlike Joseph Conrad, who had, virtually overnight, forsaken his native land for an adopted one, Mrs. Wharton’s transition required several years of shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic. At first, all of Europe beckoned to her, but, from 1907 on, Wharton would claim Paris and, after the war, the French countryside as her home. All the while, her work, long regarded as being exclusively American, followed a similar trajectory.

It all began with New York and The House of Mirth. The novel, published in 1905, made Edith Wharton a household name. Set in New York, the novel portrays the strange and cruel ways of the city’s upper class, of which Wharton was part. Perhaps it was the Frenchman Paul Bourget’s 1895 work Outre-mer: Impressions of America that caused Wharton to realize the literary appeal of this subject. Once her eyes had been opened, she would bear witness to the cruel absurdities of the world she knew best, a world in which scores were settled with pinpricks. And she would do it without the intercession of a direct witness—no narrator à la Joseph Conrad—but rather through simple observation and an omniscient point of view.

So wouldn’t exiling herself to Europe be part of the literary technique, a way of gaining even more distance from the subject at hand? Her expatriation would be an essential part of her writing process, much like that of Marcel Proust, who, after years of immersion in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had exiled himself to his cork-lined bedroom, cutting himself off from that world in order to better describe it.

But novelists will say that in the wake of a first book comes a second one, and the problem of renewing one’s material. It was Ethan Frome (1911) that accomplished such renewal for Wharton, as she moved away from the microcosm of New York. The novella was a first-rate work, venturing outside the limits of Washington Square, to the rural New England landscape.

Things went differently, however, when she uprooted stories and characters from American soil and transported them to the Continent. First, she focused on the expatriate cosmopolitan fringe in which she had lately been moving. But the insular superficial world of her fellow Americans in Paris lacked the solid material her work demanded. She needed the clash of primal forces, of rivaling social groups fighting for survival, like the nouveau riche rising up to devour the old, ossified New York. Now there was the stuff for the Epic! The question was, could Wharton penetrate the Parisian counterpart to the New York society she knew so well? And, if yes, could she make use of this foreign milieu as effectively?

In early 1907, Wharton took up residence on the rue de Varenne in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Now that she was settled, she readied herself to take on the French upper class, which seemed to her the rough equivalent of the one she knew so well in New York. This class consisted of the old royalist aristocracy, also known as the gratin (upper crust) or simply le Monde. It was a world composed of a thousand to twelve hundred families, organized in a rigid hierarchy. Those at the top of the pyramid (such as duc de Gramont, duc de Noailles, duc de Rohan, the princesse Amedée de Broglie, duc de Valençay, and duc de la Trémoïlle), each endowed with a coat of arms, rarely mixed with those beneath them. Wharton no doubt perceived a novel in this elite class, preoccupied with its own social codes and soon to fall to the advancing bourgeoisie—the very same society Marcel Proust put on trial.

But, even if her friends the Paul Bourgets could make many introductions, the most exclusive circles were off limits to them, and thus, to her. Of her French circle, only Léon Bélugou had access to the Gramonts and their peers. But what Wharton did not know was that, since Bélugou’s utmost discretion made him welcome in this most exclusive circle, its social code prohibited him from interceding on Wharton’s behalf. Why do you want to be invited to the comtesse Greffulhe’s? the comte Robert de Montesquiou bluntly asked an overly insistent female foreigner; Is it because her salon is among the finest in Paris? But don’t you see, good madam, that if you were there it would instantly cease to be so?¹ For all the respect he had for Mrs. Wharton, Bélugou was duty-bound not to introduce her. Mrs. Wharton would go no further in the Faubourg than the level of introduction the Bourgets afforded her.

Had she been allowed to sit at the Gramonts’ table, she would most likely not have fared well, for even Marcel Proust, as well connected as he was, still relied on gossiping maîtres d’hôtels (butlers) for his literary sources and information. The consequences were that, unable to gain entry to a society whose inner workings were a mystery, she would have to settle for superficial descriptions. So much so that, in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), much of which takes place in France, there is nothing there to surprise or move French readers. From the French perspective, Wharton’s descriptions are marked by sweeping generalizations and gross inaccuracies. It appears she never comprehended that this high society was shallow in appearance only, or that, in Paris, though one’s personal life might be fair game for public discussion, one’s personal finances were never discussed.

This author wonders if Wharton ever knew that Léon Bélugou, in his Far East travels (of which Wharton spoke so lightly), had actually been diligently exploiting mineral mines and developing the Indochinese provinces of the French colonial empire, making fortunes for the highborn friends whose business he managed. Nor did she show much real curiosity for the French colonies of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in North Africa), which she toured, writing a bland review to Morton Fullerton, using a postcard-like style of description that would carry over to In Morocco (1920), which she penned in much the same style. What could she possibly say of interest to Fullerton, who, as early as 1902, had sensed the full implications of the Morocco-Egypt affair and foreseen the forces that were inexorably leading Europe into war? Hailing from a country with no colonial empire, and too politically naïve to learn from Fullerton’s astute perspective, Wharton comprehended little of what she witnessed, only recounting the incidental exoticism of her surroundings.

Perhaps the same limitations informed Mrs. Wharton’s wartime work establishing a network of charities throughout Paris and the countryside. Minnie Bourget complained of the American efficiency of her approach and of her lack of true empathy for her adopted, suffering country: All of it is well and good, she observed in her wartime diaries, continuing, [a]n indispensable, well-oiled operation, with tidy, well-mannered children—but the whole thing lacks heart.

Though Wharton visited the Front multiple times, she remained ignorant of the underground movements under way. Unbeknown to her, Léon Bélugou and his friend Armand de Gramont, duc de Guiche, were intent on founding the Société Optique et Précision de Levallois (OPL), which would soon be equipping the fledgling air force with scopes and measuring instruments for its planes. They were on the cutting edge of technological and industrial innovation and were deeply involved in the war effort. Fullerton, too, was put to work, having been enlisted to make secret contacts with the American armed forces. The duc de Guiche made two extended stays as technical adviser to the United States. By all American accounts, his discoveries and their fine tuning accelerated American entry into the war by two months. The war was the impetus for this large-scale French industry, which continues operating to this day.²

After the war, Edith Wharton reset her sights. In 1920, with her works Fighting France (1915) and French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) receding from public consciousness, the release of The Age of Innocence shot like a comet across the literary sky. Fifteen years after The House of Mirth, she once again seized the theme of old New York and, once again, deftly dissected it. But its descriptions of Paris are indistinct and seen from a strictly New York perspective, confirming what Paul Bourget had always sensed: an Edith Wharton who could not fully grasp her adopted city—an Edith Wharton who, in 1919, had determined to leave