De Bourgh, (or de anything) definitely counts here.

I'll agree that there is often the connection made between French-sounding names and poshness, but I can asssure you that it isn't the class-conscious English who care about such things- every time this connection is made in Pemberley it comes from the other side of the Atlantic.

Whilst I was back in England last October, I came accross an old Historical Atlas which had a map of Ireland in about the fourteenth century with the clan names on it. In the north-west corner was De Burgh (Burke), in the south-east corner( if I remember right) was Fitzwilliam , and right next to it was Darcy. The names definitely have just as much right to an Irish connection as a French one.And just for the record, I don't remember any region associated with Wentworth.

] . A very tentative guess: the names Lefroy and Darcy are a tad more likely to come from this source, since the Lefroys and the Darcy Wentworths were part of the Protestant domination of Ireland.

I believe the LeFroys were of Hugenot descent. It's belaboured quite thoroughly in most of the bios, so it shouldn't be hard to check. However, if you look up in the on-line geneological sites, they come down on the side of Irishness for Darcy. It's supposed to be pre-Norman and Celtic in origin (and certainly, in the twentieth century has had definite Irish connotations ;-)) Have we not established that the famous D'Arcy Wentworth was an Irishman, Linden?

To answer Pat White's comment about D'Arcy, I have to say yet again, two things....

1) When I was living on the French/German border I took to looking up the name D'Arcy, or Darcy, or Darci in phone books.(yes, well, we all do strange things, don't we?) The Strasbourg phone book had one only- it belonged to a man working in the Irish department of the European Paliament. No,I didn't stalk any Darcys in Paris.

2)At about the same period, I looked at as many maps of France reproduced by Michelin ( the major French map-maker)as I could as well as a complete set of miltary maps, some historical maps, and some just plain old maps at large scale in order to test the theory that the name Darcy is french for De Arcy, with Arcy a small town in Normandy.

Here's what I found....

a) There's no place in Normandy that is now, or was, as far back as the sixteenth century, that is spelled Arcy, or anything like it.

b)There's a little town called Arcis in the Champagne region.But if the name came from there, wouldn't it be pronounced Arciss, now?

c) Michelin, the mapmakers, were not impressed with the idea of Mr Darcy being of french origin. I know this because I asked them. ;-)

] Nevertheless, they would still sound vaguely posher than obviously Anglo-saxon names.

Yes. Except perhaps , to those who have an Anglo-saxon name and think that the Normans are just parvenues. People with names like Fiennes, for instance ;-)