In a reference work published more than thirty years ago, Maurice Agulhon showed that the fact that French society became more bourgeois under the July Monarchy had led to the decline of the modes of aristocratic sociability such as the salons and to the emergence of new practices which found their origin in a common, liberal, and egalitarian culture like that of the sociability circles which grew in number and became more diverse in the country after 1830. Without putting into question the relevance of this evolution peculiar to the first half of the century, I will try to explain its limits, by relying on an important collection of documents focusing on the history of the high society sociability circles of Paris between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, during that period, spending time in certain sociability circles of the French capital seems to have been a distinctive habitus enjoyed solely by a prestigious elite, and restricted by a birth criterion rather than just a bourgeois leisure activity meant to satisfy the curiosity of the professionalized notables. In fact, the sociability circles appear to have been one of the major centers of a peculiarly aristocratic sociability which far from declining, enjoyed a renewed interest in French society until the inter war.