Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 September 1891 — Bad French of a Briton. [ARTICLE]

Bad French of a Briton.

An amusing incident is reported from Paris as having occurred at the race meeting at Autenil. An Englishman, whose French must have been that of the public schools, went to the Paris mutual booth and asked for 900 francs* worth of tickets on Papillon Quatre. His pronuheitflion, however, was not sufficiently understood by the elerk in charge to enable carry out the wishes of his client. He understood that the individual wanted to back the horse whose name was number four on the list, as he could make out a resemblance between the word Quatre, meaning four, as the Englishman pronounced it, and the sound he in common with other Parisians give it. Acting, therefore, in accordance with the idea he supposed had been oonveyed to him, the olerk gave the Englishman ninety ten-franc tickets on Jeanne la Folle; smiling as he did so, for Jeanne, although fourth on the list, was perhaps the rankest outsider which had been entered. But with that blind look which often causes a man to stumble on something which he would never see were his eves or intelligence not b inded at the time, it happecal that this error was the cause of the greatest good fortune that oould have happened to this badly-pronounoinsr-Frerioh Englishman. La Folle, to the surprise of everybody, and to the surprise and honor of the clerk of the Paris-Mutual booth, actually won the raoe, and the Englishman discovered his mistake afterwards when, looking at his tickets, he found that “the confounded French fellow who couldn’t understand what I meant, as if my Frenoh was bad and my accent not so pure as his own, actually made an error which cost him no loss than 61,404 francs."