The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.

Street · Champs-Élysées (8th) · 8e arrondissement

Rue Pierre-Charron

The buildingStill standing
Getting inWalk straight in
What's there nowPublic street

A street-level record only. The depot's building number is unknown, and this record deliberately does not guess at one.

The street where Edith Wharton's refugee organisations ran a grocery depot during the First World War. No building number survives in the record, so this is a street-level entry rather than an address.

Address
rue Pierre-Charron, 75008 Paris
Years
The First World War
IllustrationBright colour photorealistic street view of rue Pierre-Charron beneath a blue sky

A present-day street-level view that deliberately does not assign the depot to a doorway.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

Feeding people was a large part of what Edith Wharton's wartime organisations actually did, and a grocery depot on the rue Pierre-Charron was part of the machinery — a distribution point for refugee families receiving support.

The honest thing to say about this record is what it does not contain. Wharton's chronology identifies the depot on this street but gives no building number, and no directory or relief archive consulted for this entry supplies one. Rather than pick a plausible building and pin it, the record marks the street and says so.

The rue Pierre-Charron runs between the Champs-Élysées and the avenue Montaigne, in a quarter that is now expensive retail. If a number turns up in a trade directory or a relief-organisation archive, this entry should be upgraded to a proper address.

Key facts

What was here
A grocery depot serving Wharton's refugee organisations
When
The First World War
Building number
Not recorded — this is a street-level entry only
Access
A public street

In images

Rue Pierre-Charron today; the wartime grocery depot's building number is unknown.Editorial illustration
A present-day street-level view that deliberately does not assign the depot to a doorway.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1914–1918

    A grocery depot for refugees operates on the rue Pierre-Charron.

On the map

Questions before you go

Where exactly was Wharton's grocery depot?

On the rue Pierre-Charron in the 8th arrondissement. The surviving record does not give a building number, so no specific address can honestly be assigned.

Writers who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Edith Wharton

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

Wharton's chronology identifies a grocery depot for refugees on the rue Pierre-Charron but gives no building number, so this remains a street-level record rather than an address.

— Edith Wharton: A Chronology

Within walking distance

Colour photorealistic view near 5 rue Francois-Ier beneath a bright blue sky

Office · Champs-Élysées (8th)

American War Relief Clearing House, 5 rue François-Ier

The Paris address to which Edith Wharton told readers of The Book of the Homeless to send donations in kind — the clearing house through which American war relief reached the French charities.

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
Chez Francis today — black awning, glassed-in terrace and hedge planters below the stone facade on the Place de l'Alma

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
Bright colour photorealistic street view of avenue Marceau beneath a blue sky

Apartment · Chaillot (16th)

61 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 place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Rue Pierre-Charron, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1Edith Wharton: A Chronology

    Website
    The Edith Wharton Society
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Rue Pierre-Charron page.

    View source

  2. 2Edith Wharton

    Biography
    Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
    Used for

    Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Rue Pierre-Charron.

  1. 3The Book of the Homeless (Le livre des sans-foyer)

    Nonfiction
    Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916
    Used for

    Published analysis and historical context used in preparing the Rue Pierre-Charron page.

    View source

  2. 4Inside Edith Wharton's Paris

    Website
    Bonjour Paris
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Rue Pierre-Charron page.

    View source
i
Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

Explore more resources

Newsletter

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.

Unsubscribe anytime.