If you have had a struggle with your automobile tire, or have just escaped from slipping off the gangplank leading from a boat to the shore, you might well say in English, "That was warm work." The Frenchman's comment is not far different; he says, "_L'affaire a été chaude_." "Business is business" is much the same in French, "_Les affaires sont les affaires_," and "trade is bad" becomes "_Les affaires ne marchent pas_." "He is a dead man," in French, becomes, "_Son affaire_ (or _son compte_) _est fait_." The Frenchman, when he pawns his watch, does not "put it up" with his uncle, but tells you, "_J'ai porté ma montre chez ma tante_." "Every day is not Sunday" in its French equivalent reads, "_Ce n'est pas tous les jours fête_."
"He hasn't an idea in his head" becomes "_Il a jeté tout son feu_," and, paradoxically, when one gets a receipt from his landlord that individual writes, "_pour acquit_."
A fortune, in a small way, awaits the person who will evolve some simple method of teaching English-speaking people how to know a French idiom when they meet with it. Truly, idiomatic French is a veritable pitfall of phrase.
Gaul in the time of Cæsar included Normandy in its general scheme, as is shown by the ancient names,--that of the Lexovii, at Lisieux; the Bajocasses, at Bayeux; the Unelli of the Cotentin; the Ambivariti, at Avranches; the Veliscasses of Vexin and Rotomagus (Rouen), and the Caletes of the Pays de Caux.
It was many centuries before all these peoples were welded together under one stable government, the Franks only predominating toward the end of the fifth century, after they had vanquished the Romans at Soissons, in Belgica, in 486.
Normandy formed one of the four ancient provinces of transalpine Gaul known to their founder, Augustus, as Lyonnaise. Since it bordered upon the Manche, or what is otherwise known as the English Channel, the "ancient land of Lyonnese" is known to geologists as forming a fragment of what was one day the mainland of Europe.
In our later day the only attempt at the preservation of this ancient name was in the distribution of the ecclesiastical provinces of France previous to the Revolution, when the archbishop who had his throne at Rouen exercised his rights through all the northern province of the Lyonnaise of Augustus.