After Holbein

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
From Edith Wharton: Collected Stories 1911–1937

Interesting Links

“Guesthouse of Mirth: Summer entertaining tips from Edith Wharton” (Kate Bolick, Slate)

“The Four Hundred” (American Aristocracy)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” Edith Wharton
• “Success in Entertaining,” Ward McAllister
• “Jimmy Rose,” Herman Melville
• “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” Edgar Allan Poe

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“The Noblewoman” and “The Old Man,” 1523–26, two wood engravings from The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger (d. 1543). Holbein is not mentioned in Wharton’s story itself; instead, the title is meant to suggest to the reader that the tale has been written in the manner of Holbein’s most famous work. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

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On Monday, January 9, 1905, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor—the Mrs. Astor—hosted her ninth annual ball uptown, on Fifth Avenue across the street from Central Park, in the double mansion she shared with her son. Invitations went out with the simple message, “Mrs. Astor at home January Ninth, at 10 o’clock,” and as The New York Times reported, “it was 11, as usual, before the first guests began to arrive, and after midnight before all had come.” Approximately six hundred partygoers crowded the residence and its huge ballroom.

For two decades Caroline Astor had ruled the social scene of the New York elite, the men and women known mostly for their wealth or their ancestry, a group christened by Ward McAllister as “the Four Hundred”—named for the number of people who would comfortably fit in the Astor ballroom. The day before the 1905 ball, an article in the New York Sunday World described the conservative routine of “the Queen of the Four Hundred”:

From the day that she married until this, Mrs. Astor has been a woman of amazing system. Her dances are always upon Mondays, her state dinners always upon Thursdays. She has had the same butler, Thomas Hade, since 1876. She sails for Europe on the first steamer after Ash Wednesday. She keeps the same apartment in Paris. She returns always in the same week in June. Her Newport villa, Beechwood, is always open on the same date. She comes to town in the same week on October. And so each year is rounded out.

She was rarely photographed, but the press reported on her every move. Yet nobody would have guessed that the triumphant 1905 ball would be the last. A short time later, the 74-year-old tumbled down the grand central staircase of her home. Although she refused to go to the hospital, the injuries to her head were quite serious, and she never fully recovered her health.

Over the next year, Mrs. Astor cut back on her social schedule, although she did make her annual trip to Europe. She suffered a serious relapse late in 1906 that was politely called “a nervous breakdown” in the society papers. In fact, she began displaying periodic and increasingly severe signs of dementia, and her family and staff secluded her in the vast empty rooms of the mansion, where she relived past parties and social visits. In the 1937 book The Saga of American Society, Dixon Wecter described how Mrs. Astor had “habitually stood in front of a life-size portrait of herself by Carolus-Duran when receiving formally—and there in the befogged sunset of her old age she often planted herself, greeting imaginary guests long dead, exchanging pleasantries with ghosts of the utmost social distinction.” She died on October 30, 1908.

Edith Wharton, the daughter of George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, came from a family very much enmeshed in the Four Hundred; indeed, Mrs. Astor was first cousin to Wharton’s father, whose mother, Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, was the sister of Caroline Astor’s father, Abraham Schermerhorn. There is convincing evidence that the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses,” popularized by a comic strip in the 1910s, originated as a reference to Wharton’s great aunts, who built garishly large mansions in the Hudson River Valley and in uptown New York, the latter of which launched a competitive building frenzy in the blocks alongside the still-unfinished Central Park.

Wharton had little patience with those she called “the tiara-ed heads and bulging white waistcoats of the most accredited millionaires”; she once cuttingly remarked that her new neighbors “tell me they have decided to have books in their library.” Revealingly, she was not on the roster of the Four Hundred published by Ward McAllister in 1892 (when she was thirty), although her sister-in-law and niece were listed. She rarely mixed with that crowd, and when she did they were likely to become material for her stories and novels. In the fall of 1905, she did attend a banquet for eighty people in honor of Prince Louis of Battenberg during his tour of the United States; the event was hosted by Mrs. Astor after her accident and Wharton may have witnessed for herself how her cousin’s perspicuity had deteriorated.

Twenty years after the death of Mrs. Astor, Wharton published “After Holbein,” featuring a character, Mrs. Evelyn Jasper, whose appearance and late-life illness bear striking resemblances to “Cousin Lina,” as Caroline Astor had been called by Wharton’s family. In the story, Wharton portrays the wasted potential and empty yesteryears of two members of the Four Hundred as they dance toward death. In her dotage, Mrs. Casper pursues muddled gratification that derives less from her indifferent children or from friends who no longer visit than from her ephemeral memories as a hostess. The male protagonist of the story, Anson Warley, a 63-year-old bachelor suffering from various ailments, was at one time a young man with intellectual ambitions but ultimately became a social butterfly who was known to appear at every fashionable occasion—yet who steadfastly avoided the “boredom” of evenings at Mrs. Casper’s townhouse. As Mrs. Casper and Mr. Warley lose their hold on the realities of their age, Wharton brings them together for one last gathering.

Notes: Mrs. Casper covers her shoulders with point de Venise, or Venetian lace, also known as “Renaissance lace.” Mr. Amesworth is kept alive with piqûres, or hypodermic injections. The Rose Dubarry on the dining room table is chintz-patterned china. Apollinaris is a natural sparkling water imported from the German town of Bad Neuenahr.

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Anson Warley had had his moments of being a rather remarkable man; but they were only intermittent; they recurred at ever-lengthening intervals; and between times he was a small poor creature, chattering with cold inside, in spite of his agreeable and even distinguished exterior. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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