A Motor-Flight Through France

By Edith Wharton and Lavinia Spalding

A trailblazer among American women at the turn of the century, Edith Wharton set out in the newly invented “motor-car” to explore the cities and countryside of France. As the Whartons embark on three separate journeys through the country in 1906 and 1907, accompanied first by Edith’s brother, Harry Jones, and then by Henry James, Edith is enamored by the freedom that this new form of transport has given her. With a keen eye for architecture and art, and the engrossing style that would later earn her a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Wharton writes about places that she previously “yearned for from the windows of the train.”

Including photographs reproduced directly from the 1908 first edition, and newly introduced by acclaimed travel writer Lavinia Spalding, the Restless Books edition of A Motor-Flight Through France will inspire current and future generations of readers and adventurers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781632060013

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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A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE

Edith Wharton

Introduction by

Lavinia Spalding

Restless Books | Brooklyn, NY

INTRODUCTION

—Lavinia Spalding

Is it possible, after seeing France for the first time, to ever really leave? Certain roads will always take you back.

I first visited France at age twenty-three, on a summer vacation with a friend. We traveled by rail, carried sixty-pound backpacks, slept in sketchy youth hostels, and subsisted on cider, baguettes, and La Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow) cheese triangles. Don’t judge: money was tight.

Highlights from the trip include a nighttime tour of the walled city of Saint-Malo led by two young Frenchmen who kissed us on both cheeks as they said bonne nuit—a gesture we found impossibly charming, accustomed as we were to clumsy Arizona cowboys. We explored the chateaux of the Loire Valley, from Blois to Chambord to Chaumont-Sur-Loire. In Paris we followed the crowds to the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa, and Notre Dame. On Bastille Day we arrived in Lyon just in time for a festival with fireworks illuminating the sky above the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. Live music played on the bank of the Saône, and I still remember the thrill of celebrating France’s liberation—and my own—as I danced barefoot in the grass to songs whose words I strained to understand.

French was my first foreign tongue, and learning it was the impetus for my travels. I’d been studying the language for nine years when a professor pulled me aside to say that my grasp of le français was basically pathetic and that I’d never improve unless I visited a country in which it was spoken. I spent only three weeks in France that summer, and though my grasp of the language remained limp at best, it was there that I became fluent in foreignness. France romanced me. I fell for the castles, the culture, the art and history, and for the French themselves—how they dressed and walked and talked and insouciantly sipped their afternoon wine.

As the great American writer Edith Wharton wrote when she embarked on her motor-flights through France in 1906 and 1907, the French were a people resolutely addressed to the intelligent enjoyment of living. I could not have expressed it so elegantly, but I longed to be one of those people. France, my first flame, was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with travel.

Last year, exactly two decades after my first visit, I was back—this time for my honeymoon. Money was still tight, but armed with the keys to a friend’s flat in Provence and a rented Fiat 500, my new husband and I set off on our own motor-flight through France. I drove the first leg, and all went smoothly until we discovered that our GPS didn’t work in Europe and our credit cards lacked the security chips required by the tollbooths. Then there were the ronds-points (rotaries or roundabouts), which seriously threatened my sanity and seemed specifically designed to spit confused tourists like us back out in the very direction from which we had come. By the time we encountered our third tollbooth and eighth rond-point between Nice and Sainte Maxime, I was lost, unhinged, and ready to rear-end the next car that cut me off.

When Wharton embarked on her now-famous road trips through France, things were a little different. Although she does mention ronds-points in her book, navigating them was likely a carefree experience; cars were a novelty and roads empty, so tailgating would not have been the European sport it is today. Wharton needn’t have worried about tollbooths, either; motorways were also a new concept, and toll roads didn’t start appearing in France until the 1950s. Needless to say, she was not equipped with a GPS. Instead she had a chauffeur. And finally, Wharton—born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862—belonged to the elite upper crust of New York society (the phrase keeping up with the Joneses is said to have originated with regard to her family), and had recently published the spectacularly popular instant bestseller The House of Mirth. Money was not tight.

It feels presumptuous to compare myself in any way to Edith Wharton—one of the most important writers of the twentieth century—but she and I do have one thing in common: a life of travel shaped by an early experience of France. In 1866, when Wharton was just four, her family moved to Europe, where they would stay for six years. It was while living in Paris that Wharton discovered her passion for storytelling, or making up, as she called it. Clutching her parents’ travel book (Washington Irving’s Alhambra), she would hold it upside down and turn the pages while inventing tales. At any moment, she wrote in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, the impulse might seize me; and then, if the book was in reach, I had only to walk the floor, turning the pages as I walked, to be swept off full sail on the sea of dreams. The fact that I could not read added to the completeness of the illusion, for from those mysterious blank pages I could evoke whatever my fancy chose.

Educated privately by European governesses, young Edith was fluent in French, Italian, and German by the time she returned to the United States at age ten. However, her European upbringing left her disenchanted with what she found to be a comparatively bland America—she returned to the intolerable ugliness of New York with its untended streets and the narrow houses so lacking in external dignity, so crammed with smug and suffocating upholstery. Wharton later wrote of her difficulty understanding how people who had seen Rome, Seville, Paris, and London could live contentedly between Washington Square and the Central Park. Throughout her life, she would express disdain for her native land, bemoaning its dearth of education, history, and culture. In a letter to her friend Sally Norton, she once wrote of Europe, Oh the curse of having been brought up there, & having it ineradically (sic) in one’s blood! Indeed, from the age of ten and for the remainder of her life, Wharton would consider herself an exile. Like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, Wharton thought of herself as an expatriate everywhere, home nowhere. For Lily and Wharton, herself, Europe was the refuge from the dissatisfactions of a privileged New York life.

Although we know Wharton best for her novels and novellas—she penned twenty-one, including (in addition to The House of Mirth) such classics as The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, and Ethan Frome—she also wrote luminously about travel, publishing three travel memoirs and many articles. Her close friend Henry James (who accompanied her on one of her motor-flights through France) nicknamed her pendulum-woman because she crossed the Atlantic so often—as many as seventy times in her life. Wharton wrote that she had an incurable passion for the road and once told a friend that she planned to eat the world leaf by leaf.

Unlike many other wealthy wanderers of her time, Wharton was not content with ordinary tourism; it was the unbeaten path that called her. Her friend Percy Lubbock wrote that she rustled unhesitatingly into locked churches, closed galleries, and palaces where visitors were not normally allowed, in search of hidden rarities, lost treasures and forgotten shrines. Long before the invention of the automobile, she traveled by almost any means available—bicycle, train, mule, donkey cart, funicular, or on foot—in pursuit of obscure sites. Everything changed in 1903, when Wharton took her first ride in a motorcar in Italy and discovered her ideal mode of transportation. I swore then and there, she wrote, that as soon as I could make money enough I would buy a motor.

The windshield had not yet been invented, and Wharton suffered acute laryngitis as a result of that ride. Nevertheless, soon she and her husband, Teddy, began buying and selling cars (because they all broke down regularly) and touring the New England countryside. In those epic days, Wharton later wrote, roads and motors were an equally unknown quantity, and one set out on a ten-mile run with more apprehension than would now attend a journey across Africa. Despite the inconveniences, the motorcar seemed to Wharton an immense enlargement of life.

Every year the Whartons spent four months in Europe, and in the spring of 1906, along with Edith’s brother Harry, they left Paris and drove for two weeks in a second-hand Panhard-Levassor through Amiens and Beauvais to Rouen, Les Andelys, Nantes, Versailles, Fontainebleau, Orleans, Tours, and Auvergne, stopping in just about every cathedral town along the way. It was the first of three road trips the Whartons would make that spring and the next. Edith’s resulting travel essays were serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, and in 1908 they were collected and published by Scribner’s as the timeless travelogue you have before you, A Motor-Flight Through France.

Wharton relished her newfound freedom and empowerment—she felt that the automobile restored the romance of travel, and she gladly abandoned rigid train schedules and unsightly railroad stations as she realized the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of railway embankments and the iron bulk of a huge station.

Along with freedom and romance, the motorcar had introduced speed, and the attendant experience of glimpsing but not idling in each town along the road. Wharton still paid close—almost encyclopedic—attention, diligently describing the small villages through which she passed, some of them high-perched on ridges that raked the open country, with old houses stumbling down at picturesque angles from the central market-place; others tucked in the hollows, among orchards and barns, with the pleasant country industries reaching almost to the doors of their churches.

In addition to being a writer and traveler, Wharton was a master gardener (she once said that her gardens were better than her books), an interior designer (her book The Decoration of Houses has been lauded as arguably the most influential book ever published by an American on interior decoration and design), and an aesthete of the highest order. She was keenly interested in architecture, so along with observations about quiet towns and moon-washed landscapes, she meditated on the poetry of old slate roofs, on buttresses, spires, and finials, on the cornices and columns of cathedrals. She admired the curve of every apse, fell in love with golden-brown arches and rugged Romanesque arcades, and bemoaned the deplorable renovation of ancient monuments that had been scrubbed, scraped and soaped. She was enamored with both the pastoral and the modern, with history and technology. The automobile freed her to experience the countryside, though she lamented the concessions to change and modernity that followed.

Wharton had an inexhaustible curiosity that was equaled, perhaps, only by the depth of her intellect and the strength of her opinions. She never ceased to ask new questions of old places. After seeing the Bourges Cathedral, she wrote that even when one begins by insisting upon the defects of the cathedral (its irregular inharmonious facade, its thin piers, its mean outer aisles), in the end one surrenders one's self wholly to the spell of its spiritual suggestion. It would be hard, she wrote, to put a finger on the specific cause of this feeling, but perhaps the spell of Bourges resides in a fortunate accidental mingling of many of the qualities that predominate in this or that more perfect structure—in the mixing of the ingredients so that there rises from them, as one stands in one of the lofty inner aisles, with one's face toward the choir, that breath of mystical devotion which issues from the very heart of mediaeval Christianity.

During the second motor-flight (the longest one, at three weeks), the Whartons were joined by Henry James. Teddy had by this time remodeled the car, adding a windshield (the invention of which, Wharton wrote, made motoring an unmixed joy). He also enclosed its body from the elements, installed an electric interior light, and added every known accessorie and comfort. James nicknamed their car the Vehicle of Passion, and in three weeks the trio packed in more than two thousand miles. Their journey was fast and furious, taking them through an exhaustive list of towns: Bordeaux, Blois, Chartres, Cadillac, Pau, Lourdes, Bayonne, Biarritz, Albi, Avignon, Orange, Valence, and many more—but they always took time to stop and, if not smell the roses, at least inspect the cathedrals.

In Neuvy Saint-Sepulchre they lingered in the ancient, round Church of the Precious Blood, where they felt fortunate to witness a procession of the faithful making a circuit of the stations of the cross affixed to the walls of the aisle. At Notre Dame la Grande they examined the great spandrils of the doorways, up to the typically Poitevin scales of the beautiful arcaded angle turrets. The