Why fall on your sword when you can call a lawyer?

So is it Trollope or Virgil? Ever since I was woken up on Thursday morning with the news that Dodi Fayed was allegedly engaged to Another, I have been in danger of losing the plot. I've got the general idea - Dodi is a Love Rat, as the tabloids doubtless put it - but I haven't worked out whether the story has been lifted wholesale from a Victorian novel or whether we're talking epic poetry.

The parallels with Trollope are, as columnists love to say, uncanny. Gentleman of foreign extraction wins the heart of a simple girl only to dump her for a rich noblewoman. Isn't that the plot of The Small House at Allington? But Kelly Fisher's tearful press conference also recalls the Aeneid, when the Queen of Carthage wakes to find that her lover and his sumptuous yacht - actually the remnants of the Trojan fleet - have departed in the night. "What have I said? Where am I?" exclaims the bewildered Queen in Dryden's translation. "Fury turns/My brain, and my distemper'd bosom burns", she rages, not wishing to understate the case.

I don't know if Dodi, or Diana, Princess of Wales is familiar with Virgil's description of Dido - getting all three names into one sentence is a challenge I can't resist - at the end of Book IV: "Red were her rolling eyes, and discompos'd her face:/ Ghastly she gaze'd, with pain she drew her breath,/And nature shiver'd at approaching death." Apart from the last bit, it's a pretty fair characterisation of Miss Fisher, sobbing as the world's press heard she had been "wronged" by Mr Fayed.

Where the comparison with Virgil breaks down is in the course of action embarked upon by Miss Fisher. In Carthage, jilted brides called on the gods for vengeance before falling on their lovers' swords. In LA, they do something much more effective. They call their lawyers.

AND what a lawyer. She's called Gloria Allred and her arrival on the scene complicates things no end. Faber once published a small volume ungrammatically entitled Who's Had Who, which consisted of lists of people who were supposed to have slept with each other, thus creating links between incongruous celebrities such as - I am making this example up - Elvis Presley and the Duchess of Windsor.

Nothing in it compares to the bizarre connections thrown up by the latest twist in the Dodi-Di saga. Not that I am suggesting that any of the following people have actually had sex with each other, apart from those legitimately joined in matrimony. But here we have the ex-wife of the heir to the British throne involved in a romance with a man whose ex-girlfriend's lawyer represents the family of Nicole Brown Simpson, murdered wife of the former football star O J Simpson, and whose other clients include Sita White, daughter of the financier Lord White and former lover of the Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan, who is married to the Princess's close friend Jemima, daughter of Sir James Goldsmith, who was the Referendum Party candidate in Putney, the seat lost by David Mellor, the former Tory minister who was forced to resign after the tabloids exposed his affair with the actress Antonia de Sancha...

I have a feeling Elton John should be in there somewhere and I haven't even begun to mention the Princess's friendship with George Soros, the currency speculator who inflicted such damage on the British economy on Black Wednesday. Soros provided the plane which took Princess Diana to Bosnia, on the latest round of her campaign against landmines, aka hideous weapons of death - a subject she might profitably raise with Mr Fayed, whose uncle Adnan Khashoggi is a well-known arms dealer.

Clearly there is something here I don't get, which is the way in which famous people gravitate towards each other, travelling in packs on an endless circuit of international celebrity. By this logic, it was the most natural thing in the world for Mr Fayed to dump the unknown Miss Fisher for the spectacularly famous Princess Di. Has he - I only ask - ever met Madonna?

"MISS Fisher loved, trusted and believed in Mr Fayed," Gloria Allred announced on Thursday. "In return, he took her love and gave her every indication that they were going to get married and that he would fulfill all of his promises to her." This has the flavour not so much of Trollope as Mrs Henry Wood, author of that celebrated Victorian tearjerker East Lynne, (She didn't actually write the line "Dead! and never called me mother" but last week's events are right up her street.)

Miss Fisher has retaliated by filing a lawsuit against Mr Fayed claiming the outstanding balance of a $500,000 (pounds 315,000) "pre-marital support" agreement and damages for loss of earnings - which sounds like an action for breach of promise. These were abolished in Britain in 1970 but their heyday was the 19th century, when women who had been seduced and abandoned, or rejected after lengthy engagements, took their lovers to court to get compensation. The justification was a ruling, dating back to 1672, that marriage was "an advancement or preferment" for women - and they should be able to sue for its loss.

Few women still take this view, or are as biddable as Miss Fisher in agreeing to give up work on marriage. She even agreed Mr Fayed could vet her modelling assignments during their engagement - and was given a cheque for $200,000 which allegedly bounced. At this point, any sensible woman would abandon her Mills & Boon fantasies and return to the real world, realising she's had a narrow escape. Perhaps there's a lesson here for Diana.

IT wasn't surprising, with these events simmering in the background, that an opinion poll last week showed that support for the monarchy has dropped below 50 per cent. This is good news for lifelong republicans like myself but I wish it was for more high-minded reasons. Far from being a sign that we live in a mature democracy, our fascination with the House of Windsor suggests quite the opposite. If we were to hold a presidential election in Britain in the next few weeks, I fear we might elect almost anybody, as long as they were famous. We might even end up, as the Irish probably won't, with the winsome 1970s pop singer Dana.