FRENCH PROVERBIAL SAYINGS.[[48]]
There is, in the French language, one peculiarity amongst others which only becomes perceptible to foreigners after a somewhat lengthened residence in France—namely, the frequent use of proverbial expressions of which the original meaning, as far as the speaker is concerned, is utterly lost.
For instance, a person grandly dressed out is said to be sur son trente et un; an old piece of furniture or of attire is vieux comme Hérode; again, il ne se foule pas la ratte means “he takes things easily”; prendre les jambes au cou is to go as fast as possible; and a person who speaks French badly is said to parler Français comme une vache Espagnole.
When the English-speaking races use expressions of this kind, there is in them almost always some recognized allusion, quotation, or, it may be, a quaint adaptation of the words of some well-known author, ancient or modern, or they point to some fact or tradition or popular notion. In French familiar conversation, however, there are numberless proverbial and popular sayings still in common use the sense of which has been lost for centuries. Comparatively few amongst those who use them know that they are expressions borrowed, it may be, from certain customs or from history or from literature; but usually the trace is lost, the connection broken, and the reason of their existence forgotten.
These proverbial expressions have, for the most part, been recently collected, and as far as possible accounted for, and their source and history, where not discovered, at least suggested, in an ingenious volume by M. Charles Rozan, in which he gives also certain popular words usually qualified as vulgar, but “whose fundamental meaning it is all the more acceptable to learn, from the fact of their not being yet admitted into the official dictionaries; since,” he adds, “it is intruders more especially whom we would question as to who they are, whence they come, and what they have done.”
In the present notice we have chiefly selected examples having a local, historical, or in some way characteristic interest, and, with one or two exceptions, we have left aside those taken from the drama, besides the numerous sayings, not by any means peculiar to France alone, which relate to classical antiquity, and which any one possessing a very moderate knowledge of ancient history and literature would at once understand.
Je m’en moque comme de l’an quarante is a saying which dates from the beginning of the eleventh century. There was at that period an extensive belief that the end of the world was at hand, and that the thousand years and more supposed to have been assigned by our Lord as the duration of his church on earth, and of society in general, were to expire in the year 40 of that century. Sinners were converted in crowds; many talked of turning hermit; but, once this redoubtable epoch was over, men changed their tone, and from that time to this the expression used in speaking of a thing which need inspire no alarm is: “I care no more for it than for the year forty!”
La beauté du Diable we should naturally suppose meant an appalling ugliness. It means nothing of the kind, but, on the contrary, that exceeding prettiness frequently noticeable in young girls between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, or thereabouts, which then passes away. This, the freshness of youthful beauty, seems to derive its name from the old proverb, The devil was handsome when he was young—namely, while he was yet an unfallen angel.
Ladies somewhat advanced in the debatable ground of life’s pilgrimage, when youth has made way for the nameless years of “a certain age,” are said to coiffer Sainte Catherine.
It was formerly the custom in France, as it still is in Spain and some parts of Italy, on particular festivals, to array in festal garments and headgear the statues of the saints. St. Catherine being the patroness of virgins, the care of her adornment was always entrusted to young girls. This charge, however agreeable and honorable at sixteen, might, nevertheless, not be desirable in perpetuity, and thus it came to be said of any middle-aged maiden: “She stays to coiffer St. Catherine.”