Madame de treymes
()
About this ebook
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Having grown up in an upper-class, tightly controlled society known as “Old New York” at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage, Wharton broke through these strictures to become one of that society’s fiercest critics as well as one of America’s greatest writers. The author of more than 40 books in 40 years, Wharton’s oeuvre includes classic works of American literature such as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome, as well as authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel.
Read more from Edith Wharton
The Mother's Recompense Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Children Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Custom of the Country Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Son at the Front Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Writing of Fiction: The Classic Guide to the Art of the Short Story and the Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Glimpses of the Moon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Touchstone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Works of Edith Wharton. Illustrated: The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome and others Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roman Fever and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Reef Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Maid: The 'Fifties Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Backward Glance: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Custom of the Country Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Roman Fever: Short Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In Morocco Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/550 Feminist Masterpieces you have to read before you die (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Children Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Short Stories Of Edith Wharton - Volume I: Madame de Treymes & Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twilight Sleep Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In Morocco Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Italian Villas and Their Gardens Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Greatest American Short Stories: 50+ Classics of American Literature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Age of Innocence: The Wild and Wanton Edition Volume 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Madame de treymes
Related ebooks
Madame de Treymes Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Madame De Treymes (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Short Stories Of Edith Wharton - Volume I: Madame de Treymes & Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Uttermost Farthing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsM. or N. - Similia Similibus Curantur Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Reef Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe League of the Scarlet Pimpernel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSarrasine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Complete Works of Israel Zangwill Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Recruit Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPeg Woffington Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGambara Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Reef by Edith Wharton - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings“Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On the Western Circuit Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Top 10 Short Stories - The 19th Century - The Women Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWoman and Puppet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInternational Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 3, July 15, 1850 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the Cage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsM. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Top 10 Short Stories - The 19th Century - The American Women Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe League of the Scarlet Pimpernel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Lady: A Romance of Nelson and Emma Hamilton Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Will Repay: “Virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed.” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Line of Love; Dizain des Mariages Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCapricious Caroline Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Stranger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights (with an Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The New Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Madame de treymes
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Madame de treymes - Edith Wharton
Madame de Treymes
Edith Wharton
.
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