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Indeed, from a fashionable and musical point of view, it was an audience such as has seldom been surpassed in the old Russian city; and, to mondaine and musician alike, the Gregoriev symphony was the event of the afternoon. For was not its composer a Prince, a millionaire, and his composition the masterpiece of Russian musical literature?
He would, no doubt, have been insulted, if the author of 'Une Eglogue Mondaine' had portrayed in a book himself and his love for Countess Steno, and yet he had only approached the author, had only chosen him as a confidant with the vague hope of impressing him. He had even thought of suggesting to him some creation resembling himself.
He claimed that the general had stolen it, imagining that the old soldier's devotion to his interests would induce him to remain silent. But the general at once told all of the facts in the case, and also told how Don Carlos had used the money to satisfy the demands of a notorious demi- mondaine.
Therefore poor Ivan found himself treated to a succession of monosyllables so chilling that there rose up in him, first, a great wave of bitter disappointment and grief; and then a hot anger that held him immovable in his seat, in the face of a now open attack of rudeness such as few women and no man had ever before endured from this experienced mondaine.
A "mondaine" with no entanglements. Paradise opens. Liberal in works of charity, the adventuress can glide easily into religion. Once her feet firmly planted, she will "assume that virtue, if she have it not." "And then and after all!" The last tableau before the curtain falls. The pall of sable velvet. Natalie shudders. She remakes her toilet and drives to the opera.
Jane Austen is a highly enjoyable mondaine. To compare her gamut with that of George Eliot or George Meredith is to appreciate how much has happened since in social and individual evolution. The wide social sympathy that throbs in modern fiction is hardly born.
It was not the Olga Tcherny that people knew best the gay, satirical mondaine, who exacted from a world which had denied her happiness her pound of flesh and called it pleasure.
What a brilliant life there was in those days under the arcades of the dear old Palais Royal, the gay world going daily to this mondaine cloister to see and be seen to dine and wine to make conquests of the heart and dance daylight quadrilles. Paris was ordered to be daily en fête and the host at the Tuileries saw to it that the gaiety did not flag.
If that individual who gave her name to a novel two or three seasons ago, if the young woman known as Dodo be a type and it was noted by the critics of the time that such was the character of the fashionable young mondaine of the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I will not say the restraints, but even the convenances of civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we all have known it if that, I say, is the type of the young mondaine of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are subjected.
Yes, René and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation. The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane.
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