Excerpts from selected Edith Wharton texts

By Remedios Perni Llorente

My Roman impressions are followed by others, improbably picturesque, of a journey to Spain. It must have taken place just before or after the Roman year; I remember that the Spanish tour was still considered an arduous adventure, and to attempt it with a young child the merest folly. But my father had been reading Prescott and Washington Irving; the Alhambra was more of a novelty than the Colosseum; and as the offspring of born travellers I was expected, even in infancy, to know how to travel. I suppose I acquitted myself better than the unhappy Freddy; for from that wild early pilgrimage I brought back an incurable passion for the road.

Source: Wharton, Edith, 1934, A Backward Glance, New York, D. Appleton-Century, p. 31.

[…] I made, one spring, a motor–trip to Spain with Madame de Fitz–James and a dear friend of hers and mine, Jean du Breuil de Saint Germain. Before the war motoring in Spain was still something of an adventure; the roads were notoriously bad, motor–maps were few and unreliable, the village inns dubious. However, we set forth, and having carefully worked out our itinerary I was delighted to find that we were following, stage by stage, Theophile Gautier's route of sixty or seventy years earlier, and that so little was changed in the character of the towns and villages through which we passed that his charming Voyage en Espagne was still a perfect guide–book. We went by way of Pamplona, Burgos, Avila and Salamanca to Madrid; but there we were held up by the impossibility of going farther south on wheels.

Source: Wharton, Edith, 1934, A Backward Glance, New York, D. Appleton-Century, p. 330.

I was eager to return to Spain in more adventurous company, and go to more out of–the–way places; and I made two more Spanish journeys before 1914. Each year the roads were improving, and it was becoming easier to get information about their condition; and being with a companion who was not afraid of the unknown, and wanted to see what I did, I managed to enlarge my map very considerably. These travels took in, on the east coast, the Seo d’Urgel, Ripoll, Gerona and Barcelona; and we even motored to Montserrat, though at that time the road thither from Barcelona was so hard to find, and so nearly impracticable, that the ascent took the best part of a day, and we had to spend the night at the monastery. Foreign visitors, other than pilgrims, were still infrequent, and the brother who received us explained that there were two hostelries for pilgrims, and asked us to choose between the one with a communal kitchen, where we could cook our own food, and the other, and more expensive one, to which a restaurant was attached. Feeling rather vulgar and purse–proud, we chose the latter, and having asked niches in the walls each containing a bed. Our Spanish was not adequate to dealing with this difficulty, but supplementing it by pantomime we finally induced the brother to give us two four–niched rooms instead of one!

Source: Wharton, Edith, 1934, A Backward Glance, New York, D. Appleton-Century, p. 331.