The Blessing by Nancy Mitford Page A

must seem. The jewels, however, which Charles-Edouard had forced her to put on against her own inclination, were second to nobody’s. Her face, too, though lacking the sparkle of the French faces, had no rival in that room for beauty of line and structure.
    The party waited some time for the arrival of a young Bourbon and of a certain not so young woman who, to underline the fact that she was now his mistress, liked to arrive late in queenly fashion. The affair was being discussed by the group round Grace, the rapid quality of whose talk, so precise, so funny, so accomplished, so frighteningly well-informed, positively paralysed her. Her own brain seemed to struggle along in the rear. Charles-Edouard, swimming in his native waters, was happy and animated as she had never seen him.
    A moment before the arrival of the Prince, his mistress came in on her husband’s arm. She curtsied lower than anybody, murmuring, ‘Monseigneur!’
    ‘They left the luncheon together, they must have been in bed the whole afternoon.’
    ‘I don’t think so. She had a fitting at Dior.’
    When the late arrivals had shaken hands with the company they all went in to dinner. Grace sat beside her host, the brother of Madame de Valhubert and Madame Rocher. He seemed a thousand years old, very frail, and wore a shawl over his shoulders. Opposite her was Charles-Edouard, between his hostess and a majestic old woman who had swept in to dinner holding in one hand the train of her dress and in the other a large ebony ear-trumpet. During the hush which fell while people were finding their places and settling down she said to Charles-Edouard, in the penetrating voice of a deaf person, but with a very confidential look as if she thought she was whispering:
    ‘Are you still in love with Albertine?’
    Charles-Edouard, not at all put out, took the trumpet and shouted into it, ‘No. I’m married now and I have a son of seven.’
    ‘So I heard. But what has that to do with it?’
    Grace tried to look as if she had heard nothing. She was wondering desperately what she could talk about to M. de la Ferté when, greatly to her relief, he turned to her and said that he had just read Les Hauts de Hurlevent by a talented young English writer.
    ‘I wondered if you knew her,’ he said. ‘Mademoiselle Émilie Brontë.’
    This was indeed a lifeline. ‘I really know her sister Charlotte better.’
    ‘Ah! She has a sister?’
    ‘Several. They all write books.’
    ‘But no brothers?’
    ‘One brother, but he’s a bad lot. Nobody ever mentions him.’
    ‘This Mademoiselle Brontë tells of country-house life in England. It must be very strange – well of course one knows it is. They do such curious things, I find. I should like to read other books by her talented family.’
    ‘I wonder whether they’ve been translated.’
    ‘No matter. My concierge’s son knows English, he can translate them for me.’
    M. de Tournon, on Grace’s other side, was handsome, blond, and young, and when the time came for them to talk he opened the conversation in English, saying, ‘You are new to Paris life, so I am going to explain some very important things to you, which you may not have understood, about society here.’
    ‘I wish you would,’ she said gratefully.
    ‘Footnotes, as it were, to the book you are reading.’
    ‘Just what I require.’
    ‘We will begin, I think, with precedence, since precedence precedes everything else. Now in England (and here I break off to explain that I know England extremely well; let me give you my credentials, Mary Marylebone and Molly Waterloo are two of my most intimate friends). Now what I am going to explain first is this. Please do not imagine that social life is easy here, as it is in England. It is a very very different matter. I will explain why. In England, as we know, everybody has a number, so when you give a dinner it is perfectly easy to place your guests – you look up the numbers, seat them accordingly, and they just