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

Abstract

R. W. B. Lewis, in his 1975 ground-breaking biography of Edith Wharton,(1) mentions the Abbe Mugnier, a curate at the Saint Thomas d'Aquin and Salute Clotilde parishes in Paris, who was to become a lifelong friend of the novelist. Both churches are located in the heart of the Seventh Arrondissement on the Left Bank of the French capital, which includes the Saint-Germain section, the Parisian environment of the great hotels particuliers (town mansions) of the French aristocracy. Faubourg (as it is more familiarly known) is the setting of Henry James's American, where its haughty aloofness is epitomized by the old marquise de Bellegarde, and of parts of Wharton's own Custom of the Country during the heroine's brief marriage to Count Raymond de Chelles. stronghold of the Legitimists (that is, the nobility of the ancien regime), the in due time had opened up to the newer nobility of the Napoleon and Louis-Philippe regimes. It had also become home to the wealthy industrialists of the middle and late nineteenth century and, after the Franco-Prussian War, to some of the more prominent writers and artists.(2) Edith Wharton herself lived in its midst from 1900 to 1920, for short periods until 1911, and then on a more permanent basis after the sale of Mount, her Lenox residence in western Massachusetts. Wharton was introduced to the life of its salons by the French writer and Academician Paul Bourget and his American wife Minnie, the Minnie-Pauls as they appear in her letters and diaries until 1935, the year of Bourget's death. Wharton's social life in the Faubourg, which Lewis records with an eager relish for its aristocratic details, is quite staggering. Of keener interest, however, for Wharton scholars, is the number of her translators who were recruited amidst the Faubourg's literati and nobility. On Bourget's suggestion, Charles du Bos, a friend of Andre Gide, translated House of Mirth and, later, Ethan Frome. Gide himself, who had professed the greatest admiration for the latter work, was approached by Wharton for Summer but eventually declined, and du Bos did the translation (Lewis 398; see note 1). Vicomte Robert d'Humieres, a friend of Marcel Proust, began work on Custom of the Country, but he was killed at the front before he finished it (Lewis 382). eminent literary critic and art historian Louis Gillet on his own initiative offered to translate A Mother's Recompense and, later, Children, while one of his daughters, Louisette, busied herself with one of Wharton's longer stories or novellas (Lewis 485). Comtesse Jane d'Oillamson, whom Wharton had first met when she was still married to the Prince de Polignac, translated The Reckoning, The Confessional, Souls Belated, and other stories (Lewis 207, 212). Charles du Bos, it is true, had an English mother and was bilingual, and so undoubtedly was Jane d'Oillamson whose mother was American. All these names, with the exception of Jane d'Oillamson and the addition of numerous others, many of which were to some degree or other known or familiar to Wharton, appear in the diary of the Abbe Mugnier, which was published in parts in 1985 under the title Le Journal de l'Abbe Mugnier (1879-1939). Abbe, as he was known to the end of his life despite the fact that he had been made a canon in 1925, knew about everybody. He had been drawn into the milieu of the writers and artists in 1891 through his spiritual ministrations to the decadent author of A Rebours, J. K. Huysmans, whom he eventually converted to Roman Catholicism. As to the aristocrats, he started hearing the confessions of their footmen and parlor maids, went on with teaching the catechism to their sons and daughters, advised and comforted the wives, and ended up in their dining and drawing rooms. Not that he was quite without misgivings about his intense dining out. No priest has ever dined more about town than I, he confided to his diary on 29 January 1911; I'm squandering my soul by platefuls. …