Edith Wharton
Lived here · 1906
On arriving in Paris in 1906 Wharton stayed initially with her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, known as Harry, at 3 place des Etats-Unis.
3 place des États-Unis
Still standing
Outside only
Someone else
Where Edith Wharton stayed with her brother when she arrived in Paris in 1906 — the beginning of the move that would take her out of America permanently.
- 3 place des États-Unis, 75116 Paris
- Wharton's first Paris base on arriving in 1906
The place, briefly
When Edith Wharton came to Paris in 1906 she stayed here initially, with her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, known in the family as Harry.
She was forty-four and at the height of her American reputation — The House of Mirth had been published the year before and had been a considerable success. What Paris offered was a literary society that treated a woman novelist as a serious intellectual, and a distance from a marriage that was becoming unbearable.
From this square she moved to the rue de Varenne in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, first renting number 58 for the winters of 1907 and 1908 and then taking number 53 permanently in 1910.
The place des États-Unis is a small planted square with a garden down its middle, and the building is private.
Key facts
- On arriving in Paris in 1906
- Her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, known as Harry
- The House of Mirth, 1905
- The rue de Varenne, from 1907
- Private — exterior only
Timeline
Wharton arrives in Paris and stays with her brother at 3 place des États-Unis.
She rents 58 rue de Varenne for the winter.
On the map
Questions before you go
Where did Edith Wharton stay when she first came to Paris as an adult?
At 3 place des États-Unis in the 16th arrondissement, with her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, in 1906.
Writers who knew this place
Within walking distance
54 rue de Chaillot
The apartment Paul Gauguin and Mette Gad took after the birth of their first child — an expensive address near the Arc de Triomphe, and the setting of his 1875 portrait of his sleeping wife.
Visit the place44 rue de l'Amiral-Hamelin
Marcel Proust's last address, and the flat he hated. He moved here in 1919 when 102 boulevard Haussmann was sold out from under him, called it an ignoble hovel, finished correcting his novel here, and died in the building on 18 November 1922.
Visit the place
44 rue de Villejust
The ground-floor apartment Colette rented on her own after leaving Willy, remembered as a place of new independence. The building no longer exists.
Visit the place61 avenue Joséphine (now avenue Marceau)
The address where the Jones family lived around 1868 to 1870, when the future Edith Wharton was a child of six or seven — the years that gave her fluent French and a lifelong sense that Europe was home.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.