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Apartment · Chaillot (16th) · 16e arrondissement

3 place des États-Unis

The buildingStill standing
Getting inOutside only
What's there nowA building

Private. The place des États-Unis is a quiet garden square in the 16th.

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.

Address
3 place des États-Unis, 75116 Paris
Years
Wharton's first Paris base on arriving in 1906
IllustrationColour photorealistic view of 3 place des Etats-Unis and its garden square beneath a blue sky

The same quiet garden-square facade in bright present-day colour.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

When Edith Wharton came to Paris in 1906 she stayed here initially, with her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, known in the family as Harry.

She was forty-four and at the height of her American reputation — The House of Mirth had been published the year before and had been a considerable success. What Paris offered was a literary society that treated a woman novelist as a serious intellectual, and a distance from a marriage that was becoming unbearable.

From this square she moved to the rue de Varenne in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, first renting number 58 for the winters of 1907 and 1908 and then taking number 53 permanently in 1910.

The place des États-Unis is a small planted square with a garden down its middle, and the building is private.

Key facts

Wharton stayed here
On arriving in Paris in 1906
Whose home
Her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, known as Harry
Just published
The House of Mirth, 1905
Where she went next
The rue de Varenne, from 1907
Access
Private — exterior only

In images

The private building at 3 place des Etats-Unis, Wharton's first adult Paris base.Editorial illustration
The same quiet garden-square facade in bright present-day colour.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1906

    Wharton arrives in Paris and stays with her brother at 3 place des États-Unis.

  2. 1907

    She rents 58 rue de Varenne for the winter.

On the map

Questions before you go

Where did Edith Wharton stay when she first came to Paris as an adult?

At 3 place des États-Unis in the 16th arrondissement, with her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, in 1906.

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.

Lived here · 1906

On arriving in Paris in 1906 Wharton stayed initially with her brother Frederic Rhinelander Jones, known as Harry, at 3 place des Etats-Unis.

— Edith Wharton: A Chronology

Within walking distance

Color present-day view of 54 rue de Chaillot

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
Color present-day view of 44 rue de l’Amiral-Hamelin

Apartment · Chaillot (16th)

44 rue de l'Amiral-Hamelin

Marcel Proust's last address, and the flat he hated. He moved here in 1919 when 102 boulevard Haussmann was sold out from under him, called it an ignoble hovel, finished correcting his novel here, and died in the building on 18 November 1922.

Visit the place
The same Haussmann-era façade in colour, in warm stone with black iron balconies

Apartment · Chaillot

44 rue de Villejust

The ground-floor apartment Colette rented on her own after leaving Willy, remembered as a place of new independence. The building no longer exists.

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 3 place des États-Unis, 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 3 place des États-Unis 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 3 place des États-Unis.

  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 3 place des États-Unis 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 3 place des États-Unis page.

    View source
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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.

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