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connexions known. This was becoming complicated because the old nobility, unable to resist the enormous fortunes of the new, had swallowed its pride and married wholesale into plebeian families. Very important it was to know who had done so. There were not a few in the same case as M. de Maurepas, who, with a mother born La Rochefoucauld and a bourgeois father, was, like the mule, more ready to remember his mother the mare than his father the ass. So others had to remember for him. There was a special salute for every woman at the Court, according to her own and her husband’s birth; the excellence of her housekeeping, the quality of her suppers, also entered into the matter. Variations of esteem were expressed in the curtsey. A movement of the shoulder practically amounting to an insult was a suitable greeting for the woman of moderate birth, badly married and with a bad cook, while the well-born duchess with a good cook received a deeply respectful obeisance. Few women, even when brought up to it, managed this low curtsey with any degree of grace. The most ordinary movements, the very look and expression, were studied as though on a stage; there was a particular way of sitting down and getting up, of holding knife, fork and glass, and above all of walking. Everybody could tell a Court lady from a Parisian by her walk, a sort of gliding run, with very fast, tiny steps so that she looked like a mechanical doll, wheels instead of feet under her panniers.
    The look and general demeanour must be happy. Cheerfulness was not only a virtue, but a politeness, to be cultivated if it did not come naturally. If people felt sad or ill or anxious they kept it to themselves and showed a smiling face in public; nor did they dwell on the grief of others after the first expression of sympathy. It was estimated that each human being has about two hundred friends; out of this number at least two must be in some sort of trouble every day, but it would be wrong to keep worrying about them because others also had to be considered.
    As in all closed societies certain words and phrases were thought impossible.
Cadeau
, which should be
présent; je vous salue; aller au français
instead of
à la Comédie-Française; champagne
instead of
vin de champagne; louis d’or
for
louis en or. Sac
was pronounced
sa, tabac
, taba (as it still is),
chez moi, chev moi, avant-hier, avant-z-hier
, and so on. It was all quite meaningless, and so was much of the Court etiquette which had come down through various dynasties and whose origins were long since forgotten. An usher opening a door stood inside it when certain people passed through, and outside for others. When the Court was campaigning the
Maréchal des Logis
allotted rooms. On certain doors he would write:
pour le Duc de X
whereas others would merely get:
le Duc de X
; people would do anything to have the
pour
. The occupant of a sedan chair must stop and get out when meeting a member of the royal family. The occupant of a carriage, however, must stop the horses and not get out; people who got out of their carriages showed ignorance of Court customs. The dukes were allowed to take a
carr
é – the word
coussin
was tabu – to sit or kneel on in the chapel, but they must put it down crooked; only Princes of the Blood might have it straight. The dukes would edge it round more and more nearly straight until a royal reprimand got it back to the proper angle. There was a running feud between the French dukes and the princely families of the Empire, who, their estates having at one time or another, by conquest or marriage, passed to France, were now French subjects. (Prince, unless of royal blood, is no more a French title than it is an English one.) The most pretentious of these princely families were the Rohans and the La Tour d’Auvergnes, but they were all considered by the native French as rather too big for their boots; while they themselves were never happy until they received French dukedoms.
    Another