Du haut en bas—From head to foot
rrrébi
46, Se découpaient sur le fond noir—Stood out against the dark background.
47, Kreutzers.—Kreuzer, a small German coin, worth much less than a cent.
La folie reprend le dessus—She's getting crazy again ; literally, her craziress is resuming the upper hand. Folle, two lines above means crazy, not foolish.
Fourneau.—See note to p. 2.
Le bon esprit—The good sense.
48, Mais il faut que tout s'en méle—Everything must come in to bother. The tone of the conversation in this volume is often very familiar ; it would be betraying the original to try to render it into elegant English, although it is very often impossible to translate the French without raising the tone a little, as may be seen in the very next note.
* 49, Il est dit que tout doit aller de travers—It is fated that all must go wrong.
50. Au premier—In the second story, not the ground-floor, which in French is rez-de-chaussée.
Oui, fit-il—Yes, said he. Faire is very often thus used, rather familiarly, instead of dire or répondre,
52. De uhlans.—Notice that uAlan is treated as if it began with an aspirate A.
Des bandes de lard—Sides of bacon.
Plus on regardait, plus il vous manquait de choses—The more you looked, the more things were found missing. Notice the quite regular omission of the article before plus, and the impersonal use of manquer.
53. Voilà bien les enfants—That's just the way children are. 55, Vasistas.—A small door or window made in a larger one, which may be opened separately to see what is going on beyond. The word is made up of the three German words was ist das—what is that. The dictionaries translate the word by casement.
Wurmser.—An eminent Austrian general, born 1724, «ied : 1797. 0 57, Basque—Coat-tail. The usual meaning of basque, when t it is not a proper noun or adjective, is skirt or tail of a coat. The popular phrase #7 est toujours pendu à mes basques means a he is alwavy: following me, he is always at my heels. ce
VE
59, Toutes les vieilles Salomé du village arrivaient à la file chez nous—All the old women of the village came to our house in a procession, or one after another. Salomé is merely à ti
OS LES M LS nn em
ainet the rth much
in ; literrolle, two
ust come rolume is aal to try often imone a lit-
ated that ind-floor,
us used,
it began
pses—The . Notice , and the
ldren are.
a larger going on an words slate the
54, died que, when pf a coat.
Les means
t à la file
our house
merely à
NOTES, + #09 Woman’s name used in a general sense, because it is common in those regions ; notice that being a proper noun it takes no in the plural,
60, Quelle misère— What à shame. Attention is called to the word misère, which it is often a mistake to translate by misery.
Il fallait les entendre jacasser—Y ou ought to have heard them jabber,
Se faire la révérence et se donner des tours de reins agréables-Courtesying to each other, and bending their bodies to be agreable. Reins means loins.
Oursoula—For Ursula, thus spelt to conform to the local pronunciation.
Seigneur Dieu /—Many exclamations in which the worés Seigneur or Dieu occur, especially Mon Dieu, can scarcely ever be satisfactorily rendered in English, as they are far from having the force that the words seem to imply. Theyare considered in France as mere harmless interjectional phrases ; certainly no idea of profanity is ever connected with them by those who make use of them. Hence they may be left altogether untranslated, or, when it is possible, some such English équivalents as the following may be employed : Goodness ! Gracious ! Dear me! Oh my! Oh dear ! or sometimes, even, Indeed, Tzuly, Why.
61. Quine devait pas être grand'chose--W ho couldn't amount to much. The elision of anein such expressions as grand’chose, grand'mère, etc., is only apparent, not real. Anciently French adjectives derived from Latin adjectives of two terminations like grandis-e did not add an e mute for the feminine, Later, however, these adjectives followed the analogy of the others, and grand became grande before feminine nouns, but not in the above-mentioned and in a few other expressions. The printers and editors of the sixteenth century, thinking an elision had taken place, inserted the apostrophe, which subsequent usage has sanctioned. The d in grand is always silent before a consonant.
