Apartment · Chaillot (16th) · 16e arrondissement

61 avenue Joséphine (now avenue Marceau)

The buildingStill standing

Getting inOutside only

What's there nowSomeone else

The street survives under a different name; the specific building has not been securely identified. This record deliberately does not assert a modern street number.

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.

Address: avenue Marceau, 75116 Paris
Years: A Wharton family home in Paris, roughly 1868 to 1870

The place, briefly

Edith Jones — she would not be Edith Wharton until 1885 — spent part of her childhood in Paris. Her family lived at this address for roughly two years around 1868 to 1870, when she was six and seven.

The Joneses were New York money living abroad partly because it was cheaper after the Civil War, and the effect on their daughter was decisive. She learned French, German and Italian as a child, absorbed European cities as ordinary rather than exotic, and acquired the double perspective that runs through everything she later wrote about American society. The move to Paris in 1906 was in that sense a return.

The address needs a caution. The family's home is recorded on the avenue Joséphine, a street since renamed the avenue Marceau. Because the renaming was accompanied by numbering changes that are not fully documented, historic number 61 should not be assumed to correspond to today's number 61. This record pins the avenue rather than a building, and does not claim to identify the house.

Key facts

Historic street name: avenue Joséphine
Street today: avenue Marceau
The family lived here: Roughly 1868 to 1870
Wharton's age: Six and seven
Caution: Historic number 61 should not be read as today's 61 — the building is unidentified
Access: Street only; no building identified

Timeline

1868
The Jones family is living on the avenue Joséphine in Paris.
1870
The family moves on; Edith is seven.
1906
Wharton returns to Paris as an adult, staying first at the place des États-Unis.

On the map

Questions before you go

Did Edith Wharton live in Paris as a child?

Yes. Her family lived on the avenue Joséphine, now the avenue Marceau, for roughly two years around 1868 to 1870, when she was six and seven.

Why doesn't this record give an exact building?

Because the avenue was renamed and renumbered, and the historic number 61 cannot safely be equated with today's number 61. Rather than assert a false address, the record pins the street.

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 · 1868–1870

The Jones family lived at 61 avenue Josephine, on a street since renamed avenue Marceau, when the future Edith Wharton was six and seven. The historic number should not be equated with today's number 61; the building is not securely identified.

— Edith Wharton: A Chronology

Within walking distance

Restaurant · Place de l'Alma

Chez Francis

The brasserie on the Place de l'Alma that Cendrars scholarship names as one of the writer's regular stops — a Right Bank address in a café life mapped mostly through Montparnasse.

Visit the place

The theater's pale stone-and-concrete front in daylight, gilded reliefs above the marquee and trees along the avenue

Theatre · Champs-Élysées

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

The concrete temple of the avant-garde — where The Rite of Spring caused a riot in 1913, and the Ballet Mécanique caused another in 1926, with Ezra Pound shouting over the pianolas.

Visit the place

Apartment · Chaillot (16th)

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 place

Apartment · Chaillot (16th)

3 place des États-Unis

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.

Visit the place

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.