Duc

The ambition of modern ducs and duchesses is not to appear as heroes and heroines of historic renown, but to represent gods and goddesses and fairies, buds and blossoms from the garden, starry constellations from the celestial world.

Ary Scheffer, the drawing-master of the young Orleans princesses, offered to go with Thiers and procure him an audience of the duc or duchesse, or Madame Adélaïde.

“This is an outrage!” he said, speaking in the justly incensed tone which French ducs always employ when they have had woollen rabbits shot off their heads.

I had persistently applied myself to learn from the old ducs and duchesses who had been best-informed on the court of their time.

Princes and princesses, ducs and duchesses were privileged to seat themselves on the traditional tabourets; comtes and comtesses, barons and baronnes, chevaliers and chevalières made do with the lesser pliants.

After becoming the familiar of the ducs and duchesses, the comtes and comtesses he would draw upon, splice, and reshape for his epic novel, he withdrew abruptly following the second trial of Alfred Dreyfus in 1899.

Marie-Rose had once paid fifty livres she could ill afford to have a dancing master teach Gabrielle all the various bows and curtsies decreed by court etiquette. There was one kind of curtsy for the king and queen, another for princes and princesses of the blood, one for ducs and duchesses, and still another for lesser mortals.

Among the guests are Léon Bourgeois, president of the Chamber of Deputies, the Italian, German and Russian ambassadors, comtesse Greffulhe, the grande-duchesse Vladimir with comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, several comtes, comtesses, ducs and duchesses, Anatole France, Gaston Calmette, the baronne Gustave de Rothschild and Reynaldo Hahn, who sings at the piano when the initial hubbub has died down.