Beau Geste and Bête Noire

Pardon My French

Ray Milland, Gary Cooper, and Robert Preston in Beau Geste (1939)

Extra Muros continues the serialization of Pardon My French, a light-hearted look at some of the French expressions that have taken up residence in the Anglosphere.

beau geste (BOH zheh st^uh) 

Before it found its way to the silver screen, Beau Geste was a novel about a pair of well-bred Englishmen who ran off to join the French Foreign Legion.  Before that, the phrase described a bold, beautiful and utterly futile gesture, a momentary triumph of style over substance, good sense, and the instinct for self-preservation.  “I’d love to make a film about existential philosophy, with Gérard Dépardieu in the role of Albert Camus, but I can’t afford another beau geste.”

bête noire (BE t^uh n^uh WAH r^uh)

As fans of  The Sound of Music will attest, making a list of one’s favorite things can be a wonderfully uplifting experience.  Counting the opposites of our favorite things, however, is harder to do, for we end up using such awkward expressions as “unfavorite things”, “things liked least”, and “phenomena diametrically opposed to our favorite things.” 

Seeing our pain, the French have been kind enough to lend us the phrase bête noire (“black beast”).  One bête noire allows us to elegantly describe the one thing a person hates to the point of obsession.  Several bêtes noires permit the composition of an alternate lyrics to the song mentioned at the start of this paragraph. 

(Miss Andrews, if you please …)

“Gestapo agents who hang out by fountains,

Secret policemen who chase o’er mountains,

Anschluss with Deutschland,

The Second World War,

These are a few of my bêtes noires.”