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While in Switzerland, she persuades the haut monde that she is a wealthy widow — and earns the admiration of two eligible suitors.

This is the haut monde of motor sports — the fastest cars, the most challenging circuits, the most expensive technologies.

The novelist Thomas Wolfe caught a Cirque Calder performance in an haut monde New York salon, thought it the last word in elitist pandering and said so in the scathing “Piggy Logan’s Circus” chapter of “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

Others have shared this view: Marcel Proust, a Jewish outsider in French aristocracy, long held court at the Ritz, where he cajoled haut monde gossip out of handsome waiters—and sometimes more intimate favors too.

Still, vestiges of the Century’s haut monde past remain.