Paris counted the minutes until the evening papers came.

The whole fabric of the country’s seemingly undisturbed routine was threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in the balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris went on steadily with its mid-summer business of feeding, dressing and amusing the great army of tourists who were the only invaders she had seen in nearly half a century.Īll the while, everyone knew that other work was going on also. War? Of course there couldn’t be war! The Cabinets, like naughty children, were dangling their feet over the edge but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were, the daily necessity of living, continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words. Nobody believed them, everyone repeated them. The next day, the air was thundery with rumors. Wharton woke up at the Crillon on August 1st, observing and listening as she moved through the hotel and the streets of Paris. The view of the back of Edith Wharton’s apartment at 53 rue de Varenne, which overlooked beautiful private gardens. It was her habit to check into the Crillon to get settled back into town, even if she had owned her own home at 53 rue de Varenne since 1910. She checked into her favorite suite at Hôtel de Crillon, her favorite Paris hotel on the Place de la Concorde. On July 30, 1914, Wharton had just returned to Paris from a “motorflight” to Spain with her friend Walter Berry.

She knew Paris and Parisians well, and had claimed the city as her own. (And follow along on my Edith Wharton Paris Literary Tour here.)īy the time war came in 1914, Wharton was a seasoned American in Paris. She settled in along the rue de Varenne in the fashionable 7th arrondissement.įor an enjoyable read about Edith Wharton’s early years in Paris, her surprising mid-life affair with Morton Fullerton, and her divorce from her American husband, you should definitely check out Jennie Fields’ 2012 novel, Age of Desire. She first arrived in 1907 at the age of 45, along with her then-husband Teddy Wharton.

August 1, 1914: Edith Wharton Wakes Up at the Hôtel de Crillon Russia and Germany Declare WarĮdith Wharton had been living in Paris for over seven years by the time World War I started.

The age of desire by jennie fields