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

58 rue de Varenne

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

Private, and not to be confused with number 53 across the street, where Wharton lived from 1910.

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.

Address: 58 rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris
Years: Wharton's Paris winter home, 1907–08

The place, briefly

Edith Wharton rented this apartment from George Vanderbilt and used it as her Paris winter home in 1907 and 1908. It was the beginning of the shift that would end with her leaving America altogether.

These winters mattered for her writing as much as her social life. She was working on The Custom of the Country, and she was moving in a French intellectual society that took her seriously as a novelist in a way New York never quite had. She met Morton Fullerton in this period, and the affair that followed — she was in her mid-forties, and it appears to have been the first time she experienced anything of the kind — cut through a marriage that had been unhappy for years.

In January 1910 she moved a few doors along the same street to number 53, which became her permanent Paris address. The two numbers are easy to confuse and often are.

Key facts

Rented from: George Vanderbilt
When: The winters of 1907 and 1908
Writing: The Custom of the Country
What came next: 53 rue de Varenne, from January 1910
Access: Private — exterior only

Timeline

1907
Wharton rents 58 rue de Varenne from George Vanderbilt as a winter home.
1910
She moves to 53 rue de Varenne, along the same street.

On the map

Questions before you go

What is the difference between 53 and 58 rue de Varenne?

Wharton rented 58 as a winter home in 1907–08, from George Vanderbilt. She took 53, across the street, in January 1910, and that became her principal Paris address.

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 · 1907–1908

Wharton rented 58 rue de Varenne from George Vanderbilt and used it as her Paris winter home in 1907 and 1908.

— Edith Wharton: A Chronology

Within walking distance

Apartment · Faubourg Saint-Germain (7th)

53 rue de Varenne

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.

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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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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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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.