Encore and mise-en-scene are only two of a dozen or a score of French words not infrequently used in English and misused by being charged with meanings not strictly in accord with French usage.  ‘Levee’ is one; the French say lever. Nom de plume is another; the French say nom de guerre. Musicale also is rarely, if ever, to be found in French, at least I believe it to be the custom in Paris to call an ‘evening with music’ a soiree musicale.  If musicale is too serviceable to demand banishment, why should it not drop the e and become musical?  When Theodore Roosevelt, always as exact as he was vigorous in his use of language, was President of the United States, the cards of invitation which went out from the White House bore ‘musical’ in one of their lower corners; so that the word, if not the King’s English, is the President’s English.

To offset this I must record with regret that the late Clyde Fitch once wrote a one-act play about a manicurist, and as this operator on the finger-nails was a woman he entitled his playlet, the Manicuriste; and he did this in spite of the fact that, as a writer fairly familiar with French, he ought to have known the proper term—­manucure.

Then there is double-entendre, implying a secondary meaning of doubtful delicacy.  Dryden used it in 1673, when it was apparently good French, although it has latterly been superseded in France by double-entente—­which has not, however, the somewhat sinister suggestion we attach to double-entendre.  I noted it in Trench’s ‘Calderon’ (in the 1880 reprint); and also in Thackeray; and both Calderon and Thackeray were competent French scholars.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to consider nee, put after the name of a married woman and before the family name of her father.  The Germans have a corresponding usage, Frau Schmidt, geboren Braun.  There is no doubt that nee is convenient, and there is little doubt that it would be difficult to persuade the men of culture to surrender it or even to translate it.  To the literate ‘Mrs. Smith, born Brown’, might seem discourteously abrupt.  But the French word is awkward, nevertheless, since the illiterate often take it as meaning only ‘formerly’, writing ‘Mrs. Smith, nee Mary Brown’, which implies that this lady had been christened before she was born.  And there is a tale of a profiteer’s wife who wrote herself down as ’Mrs. John Smith, New York, nee Chicago’.

Yet the French themselves are not always scrupulous to follow nee with only the family name of the lady.  No less a scholar than Gaston Paris dedicated his Poetes et Penseurs to ’Madame James Darmesteter, nee Mary Robinson’.  Perhaps this is an instance of the modification of the strict meaning of a word by convention because of its enlarged usefulness when so modified.