Yes, I agree!
When she was a young woman, well known but not yet famous, an up-and-coming painter -- at the time she claimed to be 27 but a catty woman said she looked to be 35 -- she made arrangements to stay with some old European aristocrat who was famous for his "conquests" of beautiful women, and famous for being able to "make" people by recommending them and just be associated with them. Her idea was she would paint his portrait and it would put her firmly on the social scene. His idea was he would make her and then let her paint his portrait as a kind of quid pro quo.
Anyway, she gets to this guy's huge mansion and a 17 year old ballerina is already staying there along with a couple of live in girl friends who work as house keeper and maid. (It is the chamber maid/mistress who later detailed the events.) Tamara describes the old guy as something like an old gnome in a uniform. But she understands the give-and-take. So, she parties with this guy. She cuddles with this guy. She does everything but actual train-in-the-tunnel stuff. (The old guy details his adventures and frustrations to his other mistresses, who wrote about it in their memoirs so we know what happened.) But Tamara tells him she still expects to paint his portrait...
After a few days of this, he kicks her out. She never has sex with the guy, and never gets to paint his portrait.
One of the books about her life observes something like, "These people were too intelligent to let this comedy turn into a drama. So the 'affair' played itself out as a farce." (He would eventually send her a fancy topaz ring which she kept for the rest of her life...)
Those were interesting times. There was cynicism and manipulation all around, but even people in the thick of it sometimes maintained something like a bit of character. Way different from today. In today's world, a similar story would have ended with somebody's blood all over. Or somebody's body gone "missing."
We can look at these beautiful paintings (and even read some of these silly stories) and think, well, in a way, it would have been fun to be on those "fringes" and mixing & mingle with those people. But who the heck would want to be on the fringes of our society -- who'd want to mix & mingle with people like, well, Condit or OJ or Hillary...
Mark W.