de trop

The Sedgwick children’s grandmother, a Colony Club member so stratospherically snobbish that she found the Social Register vulgar and the Vanderbilts de trop, once bragged that her bare feet had never touched the ground.

“If I shall not be Monsieur de Trop, I will so gladly see them all. You haf been ill, my friend?”

People get a little antsy about the subject of cosmetic surgery: they don’t like to be asked if they have had it, and public speculation over whether someone else has had it is generally considered to be de trop.

Yet referring to this undisputed fact about Bryant’s past, on the day he died, was for some utterly de trop.

When did I become unwanted, or, as the French would say, de trop?