Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online

your uncle then? Isn’t he quite barmy? Doesn’t he hunt people with bloodhounds by full moon?”
    I was still enough of a child to accept the grown-ups of my own family without a question and to suppose that each in their own way was more or less perfect, and it gave me a shock to hear this stranger refer to my uncle as quite barmy.
    “Oh, but we love it,” I began. “You can’t imagine what fun …” No good, even as I spoke I became invisible.
    “No, no, Veronica, the whole point was he bought the microscope to look at his own …”
    “Well, I dare you to say the word at dinner, that’s all,” said Veronica. “Even if you know how to pronounce it, which I doubt, it’s too shame-making, not a dinner thing at all.…” And so they went on backwards and forwards.
    “I couldn’t think Veronica much funnier, could you?”
    The two ends of the table were quieter. At one, Lady Montdore was talking to the Duc de Sauveterre, who was politely listening to what she said, but whose brilliant, good-humoured little black eyes were nevertheless slightly roving, and, at the other, Lord Montdore and the Lecturer were having a lovely time showing off their faultless French by talking in it across the old Duchesse de Sauveterre to each other. I was near enough to listen to what they were saying, which I did during my periods of invisibility and, though it may not have been as witty as the conversation round Veronica, it had the merit of being, to me, more comprehensible. It was all on these lines:
    Montdore:
“Alors, le Duc du Maine était le fils de qui?”
    Boy:
“Mais, dîtes donc, mon vieux, de Louis XIV.”
    Montdore:
“Bien entendu, mais sa mère?”
    Boy:
“La Montespan.”
    At this point, the Duchess, who had been munching away in silence and not apparently listening to them said, in a loud and very disapproving voice,
“Madame
de Montespan.”
    Boy: “Oui—
oui—oui, parfaitement, Madame la Duchesse.”
(Inan English aside to his brother-in-law, “The Marquise de Montespan was an aristocrat, you know. They never forget it.”)
    “Elle avait deux fils d’ailleurs, le Duc du Maine et le Comte de Toulouse, et Louis XIV les avait tous deux légitimés. Et sa fille a épousé le Régent. Tout cela est exacte, n’est-ce pas, Madame la Duchesse?”
    But the old lady for whose benefit this linguistic performance was presumably being staged was totally uninterested in it. She was eating as hard as she could, only pausing in order to ask the footman for more bread. When directly appealed to, she said, “I suppose so.”
    “It’s all in St. Simon,” said the Lecturer. “I’ve been reading him again and so must you Montdore. Simply fascinating.” Boy was versed in all the court memoirs that had ever been written, thus acquiring a reputation for great historical knowledge.
    “You may not like Boy, but he does know a lot about history, there’s nothing he can’t tell you.”
    All depending on what you wanted to find out. The Empress Eugenie’s flight from the Tuileries, yes, the Tolpuddle Martyr’s martyrdom, no. Boy’s historical knowledge was a sublimation of snobbery.
    Lady Montdore now turned to her other neighbour, and everybody else followed suit. I got Rory instead of Roly, which was no change as both by now were entirely absorbed in what was going on on the other side of the table, and the Lecturer was left to struggle alone with the Duchess. I heard him say,
“Dans le temps j’étais très lié avec le Duc de Souppes, qu’est-ce qu’il est devenu, Madame la Duchesse?”
    “How, you are a friend to that poor Souppes?” she said. “He is such an annoying boy.” Her accent was very strange, a mixture of French and Cockney.
    “Il habite toujours ce ravissant hôtel dans la rue du Bac?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Et la vieille duchesse est toujours en vie?”
    But his neighbour was now quite given over to eating and he never got another word out of her. At the end of each course she craned to