Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

There is no getting away from it, Edith Wharton was grand. It never occurred to her to spare expense. On her honeymoon cruise, she and her feckless husband Teddy chartered a 333-ton steam yacht with a crew of 16. When they settled down at 884 Park Avenue, they bought the house next door to accommodate their staff. The famous house she and Teddy built at Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount — ‘a delicate French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond’, as Henry James called it — had 100 windows and 35 rooms, looked after by a dozen servants, some of whom never dared to use the front stairs. By the end of her life after she had settled in France, she had a total of 22 staff at her two establishments, the Pavillon Colombe outside Paris and her neo-gothic fortress outside Hyères in the south.

She fretted about money, as the rich do.