Madame de Treymes

"Madame de Treymes" was published in 1907. It was Edith Wharton’s first major work after the success of "The House of Mirth" which had been published two years before. 
The tale features American expatriates living in France, and contrasts new world simplicity and individual freedoms with old world family traditions and manipulation.
"Madame de Treymes" is the story of the tactical defeat but moral victory of an honest and upstanding American in his struggle to win a wife from a tightly united but feudally minded French aristocratic family.