Oh to have graced the days of café society - cotillions, masquerade balls, dressing up on a Tuesday night for dinner just because.

When things were, in the most simply put they can be, grand. People were grand. Parties were grand. Music, food, literature - everything was so grand it's a wonder anyone could stand it.

When people took month long holidays, not 3 day weekends dressed up as vacations. And there was no sense one might have but that of occasion.

Next month, Flammarion releases 'Beautiful People of the Café Society,' a book that sure as anything will have you mad with social envy. The artistic musings of one Baron de Cabrol, known much less expectedly as Fred, his personal scrapbook is a trip and a half, stamped with swans and bon vivants dripping in the costumes du jour - an avant garde, rock and roll, Sofia Coppola cum Wes Anderson dream.

A social historian, de Cabrol's fantastical display of collages, sketches, watercolors and more captures the color and spirit of an age too often dulled by the black and white portraits it left behind.

Having met at a coming-out party - you know, as people do - Fred and Daisy de Cabrol were feted around town as society favorites. Fred, a promising amateur artist who made his way as a decorator, designing the notable homes of nobles such as Ghislaine de Polignac and the Princess d'Arenberg, whose importance and aristocratic pull basically spills out of their very fanciful names. Daisy, the toast of Paris town, known for her love of a good soiree and even more so of fancy dress, having costumed herself up as the wife of Louis XIV, a tree, even on one occasion, God can guess why, as a plate!

Was life too frivolous? Too decadent? Too much of a good thing? Alors, in the words of Daisy, “Nobody can eat caviar for eight days in a row.” Though, we might add, "but who wouldn't give it a try?"

Click through for a glamorous high society montage.

The Baroness de Cabrol and the Duchess of Windsor at La Croë, summer 1946.

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