In his column "The word of the end" on Europe 1, Stéphane Bern is interested in the origins of a phrase or an expression.
Friday, he looks at the maxim "chase the natural, it comes back at a gallop", created by the Latin poet Horace.
But it was a 17th century playwright who gave it the form we know today.
Stéphane Bern suggests every day, in
Historically yours
with Matthieu Noël, to discover these expressions that we use on a daily basis without necessarily knowing their origin.
Friday, the host explains to us that of the expression "chase the natural, it comes back at a gallop", which was born in the work of the Latin poet Horace but took the form that we know today in that of the playwright Philippe Néricault Destouches, in the 17th-18th centuries.
>> Find the shows of Matthieu Noël and Stéphane Bern in replay and podcast here
From Horace to Philippe Néricault Destouches
The very first version of the expression, dating back to the end of the 1st century AD, goes to the Latin poet Horace who, in his epistle 10, writes "naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret", which means "hunting the natural with the fork, it will come back running ".
Subsequently, Jean de La Fontaine, or even Nicolas Boileau, wrote verses inspired by this maxim, but the version we know today, we owe it to Philippe Néricault Destouches, playwright from the end of the 17th century. and early 18th.
"A leopard cannot change its spots"
In the play
Les Glorieux
, he writes: "I will not tell you to change your character, because we do not change it. I know only too well, chase the natural, it comes back at a gallop."
In the same piece, Philippe Néricault Destouches writes two other sentences which have also remained in the annals: "Criticism is easy and art is difficult", and "The absent are always wrong".
The expression "chase the natural, it comes back at a gallop" is used beyond our borders, but borrows quite different images.
Thus, the English will say "a leopard cannot change its spots", or "a leopard cannot change its spots".
As for the Spaniards, by "Aunque la mona se vista de sea, mona queda", they mean that "even if the monkey is dressed in silk, it remains a monkey".