Madame de Treymes

Edith Wharton

Macmillan, 1907 - Fiction - 109 pages

Madame de Malrive heard the confession calmly; she had been too prepared for it not to have prepared a countenance to receive it. Her first comment was: "I have never known them to declare themselves so plainly --" and Durham's baffled hopes fastened themselves eagerly on the words. Had she not always warned him that there was nothing so misleading as their plainness?

Contents

• Section 1: 1
• Section 2: 13
• Section 3: 26
• Section 4: 34
• Section 5: 43
• Section 6: 55
• Section 7: 68
• Section 8: 75
• Section 9: 88
• Section 10: 100

Popular passages

Page 47 - de Malrive and passed, between the faded liveries of old family servants, to the presence of the dreaded dowager above. But he had not been ten minutes in that presence before he had arrived at a faint intuition of what poor Fanny meant. It was not in the exquisite mildness of the old Marquise, a little‎

Page 99 - Having refused me ? Don't!" She spoke with deep seriousness, bending her eyes full on his : " Ah, I have suffered— suffered ! But I have learned also—my life has been enlarged. You see how I have understood you both. And that is something I should have been incapable of a few months ago.‎

Page 32 - spectator observing an encampment of aborigines. He had heard of her as a beauty, and was surprised to find her, as Nannie afterward put it, a mere stick to hang clothes on (but they did hang !), with a small brown glancing face, like that of a charming little inquisitive‎

Page 16 - inasmuch as it represents something wider, more general, something that encloses and circulates through the whole world in which he belongs. That is what I meant when I said you could never understand ! There is nothing in your experience—in any American experience—to correspond with that‎

Page 52 - But you must not think," she added, " that I defend my brother. Fanny must have told you that we have always given her our sympathy." " She has let me infer it from her way of speaking of you." Madame de Treymes arched her dramatic eyebrows. " How cautious you are ! I am so straightforward that I shall have no chance with you.‎

Page 7 - into which her marriage had absorbed her. And there was such fear in the thought— he read such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset glories of the Arch —that all he had meant to say when he finally spoke compressed itself at last into an abrupt unmitigated : ‎

Page 99 - She uttered a slight exclamation, which resolved itself into a laugh of self-directed irony. Durham returned her look. " I can't think that you can ever have been incapable of any generous interpretation." " If you knew into what language I have always translated life ! But that," she broke off, " is not what you are here to learn.‎

Page 49 - sense of having entered a room in which the lights had suddenly been turned out, even Madame de Treymes' intensely modern presence threw no illumination. He was conscious, as she smilingly rejoined him, not of her points of difference from the others, but of the myriad invisible threads by which she held to them ; he even‎

About the author

Edith Wharton was a woman of extreme contrasts; brought up to be a leisured aristocrat, she was also dedicated to her career as a writer. She wrote novels of manners about the old New York society from which she came, but her attitude was consistently critical. Her irony and her satiric touches, as well as her insight into human character, continue to appeal to readers today. As a child, Wharton found refuge from the demands of her mother's social world in her father's library and in making up stories. Her marriage at age 23 to Edward ("Teddy") Wharton seemed to confirm her place in the conventional role of wealthy society woman, but she became increasingly dissatisfied with the "mundanities" of her marriage and turned to writing, which drew her into an intellectual community and strengthened her sense of self. After publishing two collections of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), she wrote her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a long, historical romance set in eighteenth-century Italy. Her next work, the immensely popular The House of Mirth (1905), was a scathing criticism of her own "frivolous" New York society and its capacity to destroy her heroine, the beautiful Lily Bart. As Wharton became more established as a successful writer, Teddy's mental health declined and their marriage deteriorated. In 1907 she left America altogether and settled in Paris, where she wrote some of her most memorable stories of harsh New England rural life---Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917)---as well as The Reef (1912), which is set in France. All describe characters forced to make moral choices in which the rights of individuals are pitted against their responsibilities to others. She also completed her most biting satire, The Custom of the Country (1913), the story of Undine Spragg's climb, marriage by marriage, from a midwestern town to New York to a French chateau. During World War I, Wharton dedicated herself to the war effort and was honored by the French government for her work with Belgian refugees. After the war, the world Wharton had known was gone. Even her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), a story set in old New York, could not recapture the former time. Although the new age welcomed her---Wharton was both a critical and popular success, honored by Yale University and elected to The National Institute of Arts and Letters---her later novels show her struggling to come to terms with a new era. In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton acknowledged her debt to her friend Henry James, whose writings share with hers the descriptions of fine distinctions within a social class and the individual's burdens of making proper moral decisions. R.W.B. Lewis's biography of Wharton, published in 1975, along with a wealth of new biographical material, inspired an extensive reevaluation of Wharton. Feminist readings and reactions to them have focused renewed attention on her as a woman and as an artist. Although many of her books have recently been reprinted, there is still no complete collected edition of her work.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Madame de Treymes
• Author: Edith Wharton
• Publisher: Macmillan, 1907
• Original from: Harvard University
• Digitized: Sep 27, 2005
• ISBN: 142191803X, 9781421918037
• Length: 109 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary