Clinic · Auteuil (16th) · 16e arrondissement

American Hostels for Refugees, Maison de Repos, 46 rue du Docteur-Blanche

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

The hostel is long gone; the address is in ordinary use today. Library of Congress photographic records identify an American Hostel here.

A rest house of the American Hostels for Refugees, the organisation Edith Wharton ran with Royall Tyler for civilians displaced by the German advance into Belgium and northern France.

Address: 46 rue du Docteur-Blanche, 75016 Paris
Years: The First World War

The place, briefly

When the German army moved into Belgium and northern France in 1914, civilians came south in enormous numbers with nothing. The American Hostels for Refugees was set up to receive them, and it was run under Edith Wharton's leadership with Royall Tyler.

The scale is easy to underestimate. The organisation provided lodging, meals, clothing, medical care, employment and schooling, and it kept doing so for years. This address served as a maison de repos — a rest house, for people who needed convalescence rather than only a bed. Library of Congress photographic records identify an American Hostel here.

Wharton wrote comparatively little fiction during the war because she was doing this instead, and her health suffered for it. The Legion of Honour she received in 1916 was for this work rather than for her books.

Nothing marks the address today.

Key facts

The organisation: American Hostels for Refugees
Run by: Edith Wharton with Royall Tyler
What this address was: A maison de repos — a rest house for convalescent refugees
Documented by: Library of Congress photographic records
Access: Nothing survives of the hostel

Timeline

1914
Refugees from Belgium and northern France reach Paris; the American Hostels are organised.
1916
Wharton is made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for her relief work.

On the map

Questions before you go

What were the American Hostels for Refugees?

A relief organisation run by Edith Wharton and Royall Tyler during the First World War, providing lodging, food, clothing, medical care, work and schooling to civilians displaced by the German advance.

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.

Worked here

Library of Congress records identify an American Hostel at this address. The American Hostels for Refugees were run under Wharton's leadership with Royall Tyler.

— American Hostel for Refugees, Paris (photograph record)

Within walking distance

The same mansion and garden in colour, pale stone behind mature trees

House · Auteuil

69 boulevard Suchet

Colette's long Auteuil home through the end of her second marriage — the address just before the Palais-Royal.

Visit the place

House · Auteuil (16th)

96 rue Jean de La Fontaine

The house in Auteuil where Marcel Proust was born on 10 July 1871 — at the time a village on the western edge of Paris rather than a city street, and the address his family had retreated to during the upheaval of the Commune.

Visit the place