The song, Mrs. Hemingway, is about Hadley Richardson – who was married to Ernest Hemingway between 1921 and 1927 – the first of his four wives.

Narrated in the first person, the song is a melancholy waltz that speaks to their life together in the 1920s.

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in Chamb, Switzerland, 1922. [Photo: Left]

From the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter explains her inspiration:

“This song was something I’ve been wanting to write, or investigate, since I was in college. That’s when I first read A Moveable Feast… What got my attention was that his first wife, Hadley, was sort of a shadowy figure in literary history and his life. I was always fascinated by her. People are aware of the story that he fell in love with her best friend and left [her]. This is a song about her life in Paris with him, before all of that happened. In A Moveable Feast he looks back to his life in Paris with Hadley – before the fame, the money, and the corruption if you will – and he always seemed to indicate that that’s when he did his best work. With regard to Hadley, he says in those memoirs, ‘I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.'” 

Hemingway dedicated his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and all its royalties, to Hadley. “It was,” he said, “the least I could do.”

We packed up our books and our dishes,
Our dreams and your worsted wool suits.
We sailed on the 8th of December.
Farewell, old Hudson River.
Here comes the sea.
And love was as new and as bright and as true
When I loved you and you loved me.

Two steamer trunks in the carriage.
Safe arrival, we cabled back home.
It was just a few days before Christmas.
We filled our stockings with wishes
And walked for hours
Arm in arm through the rain, to the glassed-in café.
It held us like hothouse flowers.

Living in Paris, in attics and garrets
Where the coal merchants climb every stair.
The dance hall next door is filled with sailors and whores
And the music floats up through the air.
There’s Sancerre and oysters, cathedrals and cloisters
And time with it’s unerring aim.
For now we can say we were lucky most days
And throw a rose into the Seine.

Love is the greatest deceiver.
It hollows you out like a drum.
And suddenly nothing is certain,
As if all the clouds closed the curtains and blocked the sun,
And friends now are strangers in this city of dangers
As cold and as cruel as they come.

Sometimes I look at old pictures
And smile at how happy we were.
How easy it was to be hungry.
It wasn’t for fame or for money.
It was for love.
Now my copper hair’s gray as the stones on the quay
In the city where magic was.

Living in Paris, in attics and garrets
Where the coal merchants climb every stair.
The dance hall next door is filled with sailors and whores
And the music floats up through the air.
There’s Sancerre and oysters, and Notre Dame’s cloisters
And time with it’s unerring aim.
For now we can say we were lucky most days
And throw a rose into the Seine.

Now I can say I was lucky most days
And throw a rose into the Seine. 

  – Mary Chapin Carpenter