once more unto the breach dear friends meaning

The French want to show that the British exit from the European Union is a failure, scaring other countries who might consider leaving. Donc, the French took it very personally.

and France runs across the English Channel. No country was more disrupted by Britain leaving Europe than France. They look at each other and see the ghosts of empire. And the Brexit divorce still galls, making it harder for the two small nations that always projected power way beyond their size to show puissance, a favorite Shakespearean word from the history plays. There was the submarine scandale and a nasty territorial fishing dispute with the French seizing a British trawler. Filer à l’anglaise means to slip away rudely without saying anything, in the English way.īut things are at a particularly low ebb now in terms of relations across the channel. The mutual contempt is embedded in their language. Joan of Arc - who inspired the French to win back their country from the English after Henry V conquered it and then married a French princess - is still burning in the French imagination. In “Henry V,” the French are portrayed as catty, wimpy and, in the case of killing boys in the English camp, “cowardly rascals.” Shakespeare’s history plays are still very alive for the British Boris Johnson has worked for years on a book about Shakespeare. It takes very little to get the two countries to start trashing each other. Once the guests - who wandered through an Absinthe Room with flashing green lights, past mimes and mounds of cheese and charcuterie - learned the nautical meaning of Amethyste from a post by Tara Palmeri in Politico’s Playbook, they weren’t buying the coincidence excuse, either.īut no one was surprised at the chill between the French and British Embassies.

One of the co-hosts of the party, Steve Clemons, a journalist here in Washington, told me it was a sheer coincidence that the name of the purple gem chosen to make a statement about healing and unity - that red and blue Washington should blend into more of a purple hue - also turned out to evoke the dastardly sub snub.Ĭlemons said Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser under Donald Trump, came up to tease, “Steve, I may be the only one who knows that Améthyste is named after a nuclear submarine.” (Leave it to the French to give a seductive name even to a sub.)

A recent sub deal - where the Australians canceled plans to buy French diesel-powered submarines after secretly negotiating with the British and Americans to build nuclear-powered ones - torpedoed relations among all four countries. Little did I know that I could have done my homework at the party, because the Hundred Years’ War is still raging in the French and British Embassies in D.C.Īméthyste, it turned out, was a French troll of the British: It’s the name of a French nuclear submarine. I didn’t go to the Thursday fête, because I’m studying for a master’s at Columbia University and I had to read “Henry V” - and watch Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hiddleston and Timothée Chalamet armor up to play the king at the Battle of Agincourt. Was it a promotional party for a French jewelry company or maybe a new perfume? WASHINGTON - When I got the invitation from the French ambassador for a black-tie gala called “Améthyste,” I wondered what that name meant.

Once more unto the breach dear friends meaning