Apartment · Faubourg Saint-Germain (7th) · 7e arrondissement

53 rue de Varenne

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

Private. The Faubourg Saint-Germain is a district of hôtels particuliers behind high doors; there is little to see from the street.

The apartment Edith Wharton took in January 1910 and made her principal Paris address — and which became, during the First World War, the headquarters of one of the largest private relief operations in France.

Address: 53 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris
Years: Wharton's principal Paris home from January 1910

The place, briefly

Edith Wharton took this apartment in January 1910, and it is the address that matters most in her Paris life. She was in her late forties, her marriage was ending, and she had decided that France rather than America was where she wanted to live. She would stay in France for the rest of her life.

The rue de Varenne runs through the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the old aristocratic quarter of Paris — a world of courtyards behind carriage doors, exactly the sort of closed and codified society Wharton had spent her career anatomising in New York. Living inside it was both a social achievement and useful research.

Then the war came, and this apartment became something else entirely. Wharton did not leave. She organised relief on a scale that is genuinely hard to credit for a private individual: workrooms for unemployed seamstresses, hostels for refugees arriving from Belgium and northern France, tuberculosis sanatoria, schools for refugee children. The rue de Varenne was the coordinating address and the return address on the correspondence.

In 1916 the French government made her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for the work. She also edited The Book of the Homeless, a fundraising anthology to which she persuaded an extraordinary list of writers and artists to contribute.

Key facts

Wharton took the apartment: January 1910
District: Faubourg Saint-Germain, 7th arrondissement
During the war: The coordinating address for her refugee-relief organisations
Recognition: Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, 1916
Afterwards: The lease was taken over by her friend Walter Berry
Access: Private — exterior only

Timeline

1910
Wharton takes the apartment at 53 rue de Varenne in January.
1914
War begins; the apartment becomes the base of her relief work.
1915
She edits The Book of the Homeless to raise funds for the refugee charities.
1916
France makes her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

On the map

Questions before you go

Where did Edith Wharton live in Paris?

Her principal Paris home was 53 rue de Varenne in the 7th arrondissement, which she took in January 1910. She had rented 58 rue de Varenne, across the street, in 1907–08.

What did Wharton do during the First World War?

She stayed in France and ran large-scale relief operations — workrooms, refugee hostels, sanatoria and schools — coordinated from this apartment. France awarded her the Legion of Honour for it in 1916.

Can you visit?

No. It is a private building in a district of closed courtyards.

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.

Lived here · 1910

Wharton took the apartment at 53 rue de Varenne in January 1910. It became her principal Paris home and, during the First World War, the coordinating address for her refugee-relief organisations.

— Edith Wharton: A Chronology

Within walking distance

Apartment · Faubourg Saint-Germain (7th)

58 rue de Varenne

The apartment Edith Wharton rented from George Vanderbilt for the winters of 1907 and 1908 — her first real Paris home, a few doors from the address that would become her permanent one.

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Theatre · Saint-Germain (7th side of the boulevard Raspail)

Théâtre de Babylone

A small theatre at 38 boulevard Raspail, founded by Jean-Marie Serreau in 1952 and gone within a few years. On 5 January 1953 it staged the first performance of Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, directed by Roger Blin — the night modern theatre changed.

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Museum · Invalides (7th)

Musée Rodin

An eighteenth-century Paris mansion where Auguste Rodin rented four rooms in 1908, later took the whole building, and which he gave away in advance — donating his entire output to the French State on condition it buy the house and turn it into his museum. It opened in 1919, two years after his death.

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Press · Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin (7th)

The Little Review Paris office, 80 rue de l'Université

The Paris office of The Little Review, the magazine that serialised Ulysses and published Djuna Barnes — a publication link rather than a place she is known to have worked in.

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The 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.