Updated when Danielle Steel does. Read past updates here.

In the latest update to her online diary, Danielle Steel delves into the seedy underbelly of the Parisian nightlife scene. “I went to a great dinner party the other night in Paris,” Steel writes, in a post entitled, simply, “Dinner Party.”

The party, which began promptly at 8 p.m. one cold, Parisian November evening, raged without regard for the social barriers of class or age. In an intoxicating frenzy of conversation and fine food, these baser human classifiers were brazenly and conspicuously shunned. Guests circulated, caring nothing for the subtle markers of social status that divide us all, even as the class war remained embroidered in the clothing on their very backs:

instead of one social group, or socio-economic group, there were fancy looking women there in cocktail dresses and pearls with men in suits and ties, and people in jeans and tee shirts. No one seemed to care what anyone was wearing (nor what age they were), they made no apology for showing up in jeans and sneakers, and the people in jeans were totally at ease talking to the people in suits and vice versa.

More troubling, however, was the guests’ complete disregard for accepted markers of time and place. “The conversation ranged from French politics to the up-coming American elections (which they were all deeply interested in),” writes Steel, who furthered the conversation, as if the elections had not occurred a full week earlier, and Barack Obama had not already clinched his historic win. The conversation devolved quickly. “[There was] even some startlingly frank talk about sex between two total strangers who looked like they had nothing in common,” writes Steel.

With all markers of social rank jettisoned, guests competed for party dominance through a battle of wills. “No one left the dinner table until 1:30 a.m. on a week night, and we all hated to leave then,” Steel writes. “I could have stayed there for several more hours, although we all got there at 8 p.m.”