demimonde

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from French demi-monde (literally “half-world”), from demi (“half”) + monde (“world; people”); possibly coined by French author and playwright Alexandre Dumas fils as the title of a comedic play, Le Demi Monde (1855): see the quotation from 1864.

1. A class of women maintained by wealthy protectors; female courtesans or prostitutes as a group.

   “A most remarkable instance of this was afforded in the play of Camille by the performance of the supper-scene. The stage in this scene is supposed to represent a supper-room, enlivened by the presence of a party of young Parisians, more gay, indeed, than respectable, but still Parisians, and Parisians of the demimonde, which, of the two halves that go to make up the whole of the monde, preserves the hemisphere of manners while it throws away the hemisphere of decorum.”

   “To give a good and solid education to the gentle sex would tend to double the army of progress, to draw closer the domestic relations, and to annihilate that extra-conjugal society (the demi[-]monde of [Alexandre] Dumas the younger) which is now so very prosperous.”

2. A group having little respect or reputation.

   “the literary demimonde”

   “It's fascinating to hear, for example, how an addict and charming scoundrel named Herbert Huncke — the man who became a key emissary from the drug demimonde for Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac — had himself been drawn to heroin by tales of Shanghai opium dens, “posh layouts with cushions on the floor and naked or half-naked men and women laying about,” as he tells Torgoff.”

3. A member of such a class or group of persons.

   “Those who seek pleasure in a round of dances and fashionable frolic, where the german and the horse-race, the card-table and the drive, are the order of the day, will gather to the sea side and the spa; they will seek Newport, the maelstrom of money; or Long Branch with its broiling sun and its retinue of demimondes and stuck-up-ities; […]”

   “I was called to see B. J., a demimonde and opium habitue, and found her suffering intensely with pain over the right upper chest, neck and arm, and numbness in the right little finger and one-half of the ring finger. […] Diagnosis—brachialgia following traumatism.”