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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.
1877 December 15, Emily Crawford, “M. Thiers: A Sketch from Life”, in Littell’s Living Age, volume CXXXV / fifth series, volume XX, number 1748, Boston, Mass.: Littell and Gay, page 679, column 2:
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.
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.
1990, Ronald Hayman, “For Le Figaro”, in Proust: A Biography, London: Heinemann, →ISBN, section III (1896–1905 Breakfast at Night), page 179:
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.
Orléans is the chief town of Loiret, on the Loire, and beneficiary of countless associations with the French aristocracy—even giving its name to ducs and duchesses who influenced the course of the nation’s history.
It is not recorded that any of the French ducs reacted to this incursion on their territory.
2003, Patricia Beard, “A Bachelor Abroad, 1899”, in After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905, New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, →ISBN, part two (The Richest Young Man in New York), page 70:
There were marquises and vicomtesses and comtesses, ducs and duchesses, two Russian grand dukes, Marcel Proust, and the most prominent courtesans in Paris.
2006, Linda Lee Chaikin, chapter 2, in Daughter of Silk (The Silk House Series), Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, →ISBN, page 35:
The court, consisting of ducs and duchesses, comtes and comtesses, had assembled here at Chambord for several months of entertainment.
2006, Charles Gibson, “In Old Provence”, in Little Pilgrimages Among French Inns, New York, N.Y.: Cosimo, Inc., →ISBN, page 385:
The Duc d’Uzès became the first of the French ducs under Louis XIII., taking precedence of the Duc de Luynes, on account of arriving first at the palace, having, according to the historical anecdote, overturned the latter’s carriage in his haste to be first before the king to verify his title.
‘No one knows how this for distinction came about,’ continued Saint-Simon, ‘and really it’s idiotic. It just means that you have for So-and-so chalked on the door of your room, instead of just So-and-so. Princes of the blood, cardinals, and foreign princes all get a for, and some ducs and duchesses have got them, but it doesn’t mean your room will be any better than anyone else’s, and that’s why I think it’s idiotic . . .’ concluded the duc, himself notoriously niggly about protocol, and incidentally for-less.
The mass ended, and as the courtiers filed out in proper order she noticed Madame La Marechal, Lynette’s mother, still on her knees in the pew, though the line of ducs and duchesses had already passed from the room.
2009, Ardis Butterfield, “ Agincourt and its effects”, in The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War, Oxford, Oxon: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, part III (Vernacular Subjects), page 314:
Henry had made great gains on a variety of fronts: negotiating artfully between the rival French ducs of Bourgogne and Orléans, and the mentally unstable Valois king, Charles VI, he had seized the opportunities created by their bitter feuds.
There, like the monkeys in my father’s zoo at the palace of Laxenburg, whose antics were displayed for the delight of the Austrian elite, Louis Auguste and I were expected to amuse the crush of ducs and duchesses, marquis and marquises, and comtes and comtesses whose rank accorded them the privilege of watching the heirs to the throne of France play a few rounds of cavagnole with members of the Orléans branch of the Bourbons.
Here, resplendent in their uniforms of office, were the princes and princesses, the ducs and duchesses, the marquises and marchionesses, the maréchals and the generals of the French Army, the prelates of the Holy Roman Church and their mistresses, sycophants and influence peddlers, deposed members of foreign royalty, aged courtiers of Louis the Sun King, current and past court officials, members of the Académie Royale, scientists, philosophers, artists, courtesans, past and present mistresses of the king as well as lesser family and irrelevant nobility from the provinces, all assembled at the glittering court of King Louis XV like overlooked and faded objets d’art in an storeroom.
2022, Belinda Scerri, “‘Instructing herself by fad or fancy’: Depictions and Fictions of Connoisseuses and Femmes Savantes in Eighteenth-Century Paris”, in Beatrijs Vanacker, Lieke van Deinsen, editors, Portraits and Poses: Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern Europe, Leuven: Leuven University Press, →ISBN, part II (Types and Models of Female Intellectual Authority), page 187:
She was the eighth child of the duc and duchesse of Enghien and, as a member of the reigning Bourbon house, was styled a princesse du sang, or princess of the blood.