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LADY ASTOR’S SHARP TONGUE

No class. No neck. No mincing.

Rampaging Alzheimer’s aside, Brooke Astor still had the marbles at age 100 to brutally sum up her loathed daughter-in-law Charlene Marshall — snarking aloud about the portly woman’s lack of both a neck and a pedigree.

“She said [Charlene] had no class and no neck,” butler Christopher Ely remembered on the witness stand yesterday, the start of Week Seven of testimony in the Astor swindle trial. “The whole time I worked for Mrs. Astor, she didn’t have nice things to say about Mrs. Marshall.”

Manhattan prosecutors say Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, now 85, pressured and swindled his feeble mother into signing away more than $60 million long slated for charity — and did it all for Charlene, the greedy wife 20 years his junior.

A sane Astor would never have willingly thrown those millions Charlene’s way, prosecutors argue. The defense counters that Astor had a change of heart when she made several huge gifts to the couple in 2003 and 2004 — a good two years after Astor was overheard calling Charlene “that bitch.”

Ely, who once worked as a footman for Queen Elizabeth, was one of two Astor retainers testifying yesterday about how Marshall allegedly pinched his mother’s pennies to safeguard his hoped-for inheritance. Ely told jurors he resorted to going out himself to buy Astor nighties, underwear and bedwetting pads.

The other, Astor’s French former maid Millie de Gernier, told jurors Marshall vetoed a safety gate for the stairwell in his mother’s Park Avenue duplex, put the kibosh on annual rug cleanings, and even insisted de Gernier halt the expensive weekly order for fancy flower arrangements.

“He said I could get them by the Korean market,” the maid sniffed, testifying with a heavy French accent.

The maid said she had stood silently as Marshall lifted two expensive paintings off his mother’s walls — “Dancing Dogs with Musicians and Bystanders,” by Tiepolo, and “Two Bedouins with a Camel,” by John Frederick Lewis, valued at a total of almost $600,000.

But she drew the line at budget bodega blossoms, and instead ordered fewer of the fancier flowers.

Ely’s testimony continues today.

laura.italiano@nypost.com