grande-duchesse

plural grandes-duchesses · alternative grande duchesse

1. A French grand duchess.

   The Grand-duc and Grande-duchesse Cyril, with their children, are expected at the Elysée Palace, Cannes, for the winter.

   1921, Town & Country, volumes 77–78, page 54

   3 more examples

   Giving way to the passion of the moment, the Emperor “offers implicitly to the Czar to deliver up Poland to him as the price of a grande-duchesse.” […] [quoting Armand-Augustin-Louis de Caulaincourt, duc de Vicence] Like all the grandes-duchesses she has been well brought up and educated.

   1925, Walter Geer, Napoleon and Marie-Louise: The Fall of the Empire, New York, N.Y.: Brentano’s, pages 134 and 147

   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.

   1990, Ronald Hayman, “For Le Figaro”, in Proust: A Biography, London: Heinemann, →ISBN, section III (1896–1905 Breakfast at Night), page 179

   The most important introduction Gontaut made for her was to Grand-Duc and Grande-Duchesse Wladimir of Russia, the GDWs to their intimates.

   2018, Caroline Weber, Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris, New York, N.Y.: Vintage Books, published 2019, →ISBN, page 196