Salon · Invalides (7th) · 7e arrondissement

Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James's salon, 142 rue de Grenelle

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

The building now houses the Swiss embassy and is not open to visitors. The salon belongs entirely to the past.

The Faubourg Saint-Germain salon where Edith Wharton found her Paris society — the Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James's Tuesdays, and the circle in which her relationship with Morton Fullerton developed.

Address: 142 rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris
Years: Rosa de Fitz-James's Tuesday salon, in the years before the First World War

The place, briefly

Rosa de Fitz-James was Viennese by birth and an outsider by origin, and she built one of the more determined salons of pre-war Paris in this house on the rue de Grenelle. Her Tuesdays gathered writers, diplomats, academicians and aristocracy, and getting into them was an achievement.

Edith Wharton attended and thrived. This was the French intellectual society she had wanted and had not found in New York, and it took her seriously. It was also the milieu in which her relationship with the journalist Morton Fullerton developed — the affair that ran through the years around 1908 and left its mark on her fiction.

The house is now the Swiss embassy. The salon is entirely historical and there is nothing to visit.

Key facts

Whose salon: The Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James
When: Tuesdays, in the years before the First World War
Why it mattered to Wharton: It was her entry into French intellectual society
The building today: The Swiss embassy
Access: Not open to visitors

Timeline

1900s
Wharton attends the Fitz-James Tuesdays after settling in Paris.

On the map

Questions before you go

Whose salon did Edith Wharton attend in Paris?

Among others, the Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James's Tuesday gatherings at 142 rue de Grenelle in the 7th arrondissement.

Can you visit the house?

No. It houses the Swiss embassy and is not open to the public.

Writers who knew this place

Edith Wharton

American · American novelist of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, who left New York for Paris in 1907, kept an apartment on the rue de Varenne in the Faubourg Saint-Germain — the aristocratic quarter on the Left Bank — for thirteen years, ran refugee charities through the First World War that earned her the Légion d'honneur, France's highest national honour, in 1916, and became, in 1921, the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize, America's foremost literary award, for a novel.

Frequented by

Wharton attended the Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James's Tuesday salon on the rue de Grenelle, the Paris social world in which her relationship with the journalist Morton Fullerton developed.

— A Day in Paris with Edith Wharton

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