The Paris journal of the Abbé Mugnier, which he kept for sixty years
(1879–1939), was published by Mercure de France in 1985 and has
yet to been done into English. It is the
remarkable record of a priest who knew and confessed the cream of
the old aristocracy of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and who was also
the friend and sometimes the intimate of many of the leading literary
and artistic lights of the time.

The Abbé’s nobler qualities have been somewhat swamped by his
reputation as the spiritual guide of the gratin and by his long
remembered quips, as, for example, his reply to the aging actress who
asked him if it was a sin for her to admire her own beauty when she
looked in a mirror: “No, my dear, it’s only an error.” Or to the
avid social climber who, finding that each new level he attained was
not the “true” faubourg, asked impatiently if the true faubourg was
simply where he wasn’t: “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you.”

It is perfectly true, as the Abbé admitted in his journal, that he
loved the “great world,” with its “titles, beautiful houses, gilded
panels, chandeliers, wits, and celebrities,” but he hoped, as with
Proust, whose good friend he became, that its attraction was largely
in the romantic historical associations that it provided for his
intensely active imagination. He certainly never allowed himself to
overlook the shabby aspects of society.

“These