A Month of Novellas, Book 11: Madame de Treymes - Edith Wharton (1907)

on desk, dreaming of far away places

How do you solve a problem like Madame de Treymes? Intrigue, intrigue, intrigue.

I've read Edith Wharton before. What college graduate hasn't? Ethan Frome is a handy little novel when someone is trying to be lazy about reading a classic. Short, few characters, perfect for the non-literary sort of college student.
But I'd already read that a long time ago, along with The Age of Innocence, a longer novel, and so had to come up with another title.

...Well, I say I had to, but no, no one forced me. But I thought I'd give Ms. Wharton another go seeing as she's a master at what she does.

It's just that what she does I tend to dislike. That's probably on me, and has nothing to do with the quality of her work.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Madame de Treymes is a wisp of a book, only 57 pages from beginning to end. But oh, how I wanted it to be even shorter.

It deals with an American, John Durham, who has fallen in love with Madame de Malrive, an American born married woman, who has been estranged from her husband for many years.
He'd like to marry her, but at first is unsure if she's even interested in him. Durham soon finds out that although she's receptive to his love, she's unwilling to do anything about it, as she is chained by deeper bonds to her separated husband.

Her husband's family is what we'd now call, very old school, and will have no divorce scandal damaging their standing in society. So even though her husband's indiscretions are spoken of as more than enough reason for a judge to grant a divorce - my mind started to wonder far and afield at what he could've done that was so egregious; a mere affair didn't seem like such an overwhelming reason in a French court - his family is wholly against it and will take away her child if she tries to divorce.

So Madame de Malrive asks Mr. Durham to find out for her if the family is in any way willing to allow her to divorce. If they'll even consider it, for she fears that to even bring it up, alone will be enough for them to take away her young son.

We are then treated to an intrigue worthy of Les liaisons dangereuses with Madame de Treymes saying one thing and then another and then another, but did she mean it? etc, etc, ad nauseum.

All it came to in the end for me was a whole lot of fuss about some rich people. This sounds possibly like reverse snobbery, but just as reading The Age of Innocence many years ago left me absolutely cold, so did this shorter work.

Wharton is a wizard at depicting the life and times of the people in her milieu and I'm glad she did. But I still can't bring myself to care about what games spoiled, entitled people will play with each other.