THE G UERMANTES WAY
stringed bonnets, wasp-waist, curled fringe and high dog-collar.
But when asked by admiring rivals where some amazingly elegant
dress came from, she would say: "My maid ran it up for me." She
was still beautiful, with a frigid, bolt-upright English manner.
Next to the La Tremoilles and the La Rochefoucaulds the
premier dukes of France were the Uzes's, the pronunciation of
whose name by the gratin ('Uzai', without the final's') so
astonishes and enraptures Legrandin's sister, the Marquise de
Cambremer.l A former Duc d'Uzes, when the king expressed
surprise that no U zes had ever been Marshal of France, had
replied: "Sire, we are always killed in battle too soon." The
Dowager Duchesse Anne d'Uzes was a remote cousin of
Adheaume de Chevigne and granddaughter of the Veuve
Clicquot of champagne fame; but first and foremost she was a
Mortemart, of the family whose wit was so famous under Louis
XIV. "I was so exasperated by Saint-Simon's incessant talk about
the 'Mortemart wit', without once telling us in what it consisted,"
Proust says, "that I resolved to go one better and invent the
Guermantes wit." The duchesse liked to be told, however un-
truthfully, that she had the Mortemart wit. She was a dumpy,
formidable, horsy woman, a poetess, novelist, sculptress, yachts-
woman, feminist, huntress and motorist: by the time of her death
in I933 at the age of 86 the grisly antlers of more than two
thousand stags which she had slain in person had been nailed to
the walls of her hunting-lodge in the Forest of Rambouillet; and
in I897 she became the first woman in France to hold a driving-
licence for one of the new-fangled motor-carriages. She was
thought to have been the mistress of General Boulanger (and of
the old Prince Joseph de Caraman-Chimay and the Duc de La
Tremoille), though she always denied it; but it was certain that
she had contributed three million francs to the shifty general's
lost cause. On another occasion she was more thrifty, to her. lasting sorrow. Her son Jacques became infatuated with the
cocotte Emilienne d'Alencron, who was exhibiting a troupe of
performing white rabbits-though nobody had eyes for the
rabbits-to enthusiastic crowds at the Cirque d'Ete in the
Champs-Elysees. Soon she was to be seen wearing the Uzes
family jewels. With the best intentions the Duchesse packed her
son off to the Congo; but the poor young man died of enteric
1 II, 819