Beau monde

...and I am sure you will permit me to invite a friend or two, for you know I only deal with choice spirits, the élite of the beau monde.

But the intellectuals one meets are something else again. I didn't behave well with the mental beau monde of Chicago.

After finding the studio in West Kensington, and just before starting Pernel’s portrait, he spent an evening at the Kennedy’s where, he told Carrington excitedly, he met ‘a charming beau-monde blonde . . . who with her brightness and stoutness combined with some languishing glances, succeeded in half-ravishing me’.

Like the prodigal rastaquouères—those Latin American millionaires who flaunted their wealth in Paris in the hope of gaining entry into the beau monde—writers and intellectuals loved to put on cosmopolitan airs after visiting the French capital—they had left their Hispanic backwaters and could now swim with the tide of modern life.

The beau monde went to the Maria II opera house to see and be seen.