French

French proverbs, at a glance

• Great works take time; do not measure the labour against an hour.

  Rome ne fu pas faite toute en un jour.

  Literally: Rome was not made entirely in a day.

  French · France

  Set beside

  • Spanish — Zamora wasn't won in an hour, and the siege the proverb remembers really did last seven months
  • Russian — Moscow swapped in for Rome, with the steppe winter's slow accretion in the background
  • Mandarin — three feet of ice is not the work of one cold day; the same claim made by the climate, not the masons

• The habit doesn't make the monk

  L'habit ne fait pas le moine

  Literally: The habit does not make the monk

  French · France

  Set beside

  • Latin — *cucullus non facit monachum*, the medieval source the French is descended from, with the cloister proper rather than the cloth around it
  • English — the cloister has been replaced by a printed book, but the warning against trusting the binding is the same
  • Mandarin — *人不可貌相*, the warning kept entirely abstract, with no garment and no book to disguise the claim

• A meal coaxed from a village by the appearance of needing nothing more than a stone.

  Soupe au caillou.

  Literally: Soup of stone.

  French · France

  Set beside

  • Portuguese — the same fable, given a particular town in Almeirim and a yearly festival to match
  • Russian — the stone is replaced by an axe, the soup by porridge, and the tone gets sharper
  • English — the modern children's book canon that fixed the fable's American shape

• Once burned, you become afraid even of what cannot hurt you.

  Chat échaudé craint l'eau froide.

  Literally: A scalded cat fears cold water.

  French · France

  Set beside

  • Italian — the same image, almost word for word, with a Mediterranean shrug attached
  • English — the lesson without the cat, abstracted into a piece of social advice
  • Mandarin — past trauma generalized over ten years and across the boundary of substance