In Vanity Fair: A Tale of Frocks and Femininity

by Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

The pretentiousness of château entertainment depends, of course, upon the financial condition of the owner, and it is at the country places of the rich bourgeois, rather than in the most famous historic houses of France, that money is spent most freely during the château season, though American millions have made some aristocratic house parties famous for prodigal extravagance.

Where money need not stand in the way, the programme of entertainment is often a costly one. Perhaps, as has happened before now, theatricals are the order of the day, and the entire company of one of the Parisian theatres is brought down from Paris for the occasion. Or a costume ball is on the tapis and the great dressmakers of the Rue de la Paix are called upon for dazzling costumes. Or a popular diseuse or chanteuse or dancer may be lured away from her café chantant for the evening in order to enliven the lovers of nature who have fled to sylvan haunts.

And always one can play bridge. Ye gods, how they play bridge during the autumn days and nights, those transplanted Parisians!

All through the long days when the men are off after bird or deer, the women, arrayed in the daintiest of bridge coats or frocks, sit around the card tables playing for stakes that are not always low; and indeed there are many days when even the men themselves forsake the coverts for the card tables. During the last château season, rumours ran concerning eighteen-hour sessions of bridge when mesdames and messieurs did not lay down their cards save for hasty luncheon and dinner. Stories were told, too, of immense losses sustained by guests at several famous houses, and games at a louis a point have ceased to be rare in the fashionable Parisian set. Some devotees of the game have, it is said, even installed little bridge tables in the salons of their loges at the opera and spirited games are played there in the intervals of the music, or to the neglect of the music.

There are fashionable hostesses who deplore the craze, but the chief accusation brought against the game is characteristically French. One hears little protest against the ethics of bridge, but it appears that the new fad is killing conversation. If this is true, say the critics, something must indeed be done to save France. Conversation is, with the French, a religion, a heritage, an acquirement, an art, and this fine product of the centuries must not be allowed to perish in an epidemic of gambling.

Even after a night spent at bridge, at least a large percentage of the château party is up and off to the meet in the grey of the morning. Madame may, perhaps, sleep later on, but the meet is an occasion, a social function, a golden opportunity for coquetry; and even if one does not expect to follow the hounds one must be in evidence at the reunion. So my lady is up betimes and at work upon her toilette, a toilette to the planning of which she has devoted anxious hours before leaving Paris. One must be très chic at the meet, for les messieurs will be out in force and the sporting scene with its forest setting will admit of a touch of audacity in dress.

Even the true sportswoman of France does not forget to be coquette, and her interest in habit or shooting costume does not interfere with her sporting zeal. There are Frenchwomen who go boar hunting and wolf hunting with their husbands. Others, like the Baronne de Brandt or the Marquise de Bois-Hebert, visit the out-of-the-way corners of Europe in search of exciting sport, and a long list of Parisian society leaders like the Marquise de Beauvoir, the Comtesse de Fels, the young Duchesses de Luynes, de Noailles, and d'Uzes, make excellent records in the home forests.

The name of d'Uzes is important in modern French hunting annals, though its claims do not rest on modernity. On the contrary the equipage d'Uzes stands for all that is traditional and historic in French venery, and the dowager Duchesse d'Uzes, holding fast to the customs and traditions of the old régime, keeps up the hunt in her forests as the Ducs d'Uzes have kept it up through many a generation and many a change in the affairs of France.

Sixty thousand acres of the forest of Rambouillet are leased by the Duchess for her hunting-grounds, and, though the favourite château of the President of France lies across the woodland from her own hunting château of Bonnelles, and his excellency the President of the French Republic may, if he chooses, shoot birds and rabbits in the forest, which is the property of the state, it is the Duchess who reigns in Rambouillet forest and the republican ruler may not chase the stag there, unless this great lady of old France graciously extends an invitation to him.