After the death of Isaure de Miramon, Winnaretta did not “receive” for almost two years; indeed, she shunned company. Her tendency towards asceticism became more pronounced. The empty house was kept at uncomfortably low temperatures. She ate little, but because she was less active, she gained weight. She read constantly, studied Greek, and spent long hours playing Bach's organ fugues. Her infrequent luncheon or dinner guests—mostly Anna or Hélène, or her nieces or nephews—were treated to meager repasts, during which Winnaretta gazed into space, beyond reach. Attempts by friends to engage her in activity were rejected. When Augustine Bulteau asked if she would be willing to host an evening of monologues by the British comedian Ruth Draper in her atelier, Winnaretta responded, “I would be very glad to meet her, but as I am no longer receiving, I have, I’m afraid, very little influence in the ‘salons.’”

These solitary years coincided with the successive deaths of various figures from her personal and artistic life, both friends and foes: Robert de Montesquiou, querulous to the end; the sensible and much beloved Louise de Polignac; her stepfather Paul Sohège; and saddest of all, her cherished friend and “spiritual advisor” Augustine Bulteau, who died in September 1922 while Winnaretta was away in Venice. The last significant death of that period was that of Marcel Proust, who succumbed on 18 November 1922 to the ill health that had pursued him for most of his life. Proust had chronicled one of Winnaretta's rare appearances in society during her selfimposed two-year exile when, in June 1921, the two had crossed paths at a party given in honor of the marriage of the Duke of Marlborough to another American “dollar princess,” Gladys Deacon. On that occasion Winnaretta had seemed to Proust “icy as a cold draft, looking the image of Dante.” (What the writer perceived as coldness was more likely Winnaretta's shocked reaction to Proust's pallid, sickly complexion, as well as his to peculiar party attire: he had come dressed in a long seal-skin dressing gown that drooped around his ankles.) Nonetheless, she had responded with undisguised delight when he informed her, “Paul Morand likes you very much.”