Sir,
It is with a heavy but disciplined heart that I write to draw a discreet curtain across the recent exchange between Mr Wethercombe and Ms d’Abernon regarding the Mayfair Book Groupette.
As a long-serving member of this most esteemed of societies, I can assure your readers that the Groupette does not, as Mr Wethercombe insinuates, derive any pleasure from excluding applicants. We derive it from selecting them. There is a distinction, though I appreciate it may be invisible to those unaccustomed to life beyond the velvet rope.
The admissions process—so tediously caricatured in these pages—exists for the same reason the Musée du Louvre does not hang every watercolour of a yacht that arrives at its gates. Standards must be upheld, and they are, if anything, more fragile in the realm of ideas than in the realm of oils and gouache.
Mr Wethercombe’s allusions to Pascal’s supposed “backward curl” are beneath reply, save to note that the hound has been known to take the same position toward visiting dignitaries, senior curators, and on one occasion a former Prime Minister. He is impartial in his disdain.
The Groupette has no wish to prolong this public correspondence, nor to weaponise your Letters page as an adjunct of our selection committee. I will simply observe that those who wait outside our doors may, in time, come to value the waiting more than the entry. For some, this becomes a kind of intellectual home. For others, it appears to become a book.
Yours faithfully,
Lord E. Northcote
Mayfair, London
