But in my gourmet demimonde, ordering steak well done is an embarrassment.

WSJ: Love and Barbecue

Where else but San Francisco would an underground gourmet produce market become the destination for the downtown demimonde to purchase kombucha and bergamot marmalade on their weekend nights?

WSJ: Journal Concierge: San Francisco

She would even have sought a place in the demimonde of singers and film actresses, bright and dangerous creatures from poor backgrounds, but she had neither talent nor beauty.

NEWYORKER: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Both have lived out versions of the city's bootstrapping myth: arriving as ambitious young men, plunging into the demimonde and ascending to become tastemakers and toasts of the town.

WSJ: The Musician and the Producer

Parrot is at home in the artistic demimonde.

ECONOMIST: New fiction 2

Lured by Lenz into the cast, Anne suspects that his life is endangered by the same cabal that may have killed his friend Juan, a composer whose lost final recording Lenz sends her deep into the demimonde to find.

NEWYORKER: Paris Belongs to Us

Louboutin presents his early separation from his parents as an inevitability, rather than as a trauma: he was a tween with a portfolio, a half-pint of the demimonde who, even at the age of twelve, had people to see and ventures to tend to.

NEWYORKER: Sole Mate