What's In A Name?

Rue le Regrattier (or Rue Regratier should you prefer stone to enamel) is these days about as desirable an address as you can get, plonked as it is on the Ile Saint Louis in the middle of the Seine, overlooking Notre Dame, but until this morning I had not thought to look up the meaning of the word.

Regrettably I could find neither 'regratier' nor 'regrattier' in my monstrous, table-sized Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary so I had to resort to the vagaries of the interweb.

Apparently the ever-entertaining Voltaire included it in his Dictionnaire Philosophique as "Écrivassier, compilateur ignorant" which pretty much describes me …

But the general consensus of opinion seems to be that of the Dictionnaire de Français 'Littré':

"Regrattier: nom masculin singulier
1: celui qui vendait de menues denrées au détail ou en seconde main;
2: personne d'une avarice sordide;
avare, grigou, pleure-misère, chichard, rat, harpagon, pisse-vinaigre, rapace, usurier, fesse-Matthieu, grippe-sou."

So … obscenely wealthy residents of Rue le Regrattier … welcome to Huckster Street, Sordid Avarice Avenue, or alternatively Piss-Vinegar Road, or even more gloriously, Matthew's Buttock Boulevard ("fesse-Matthieu" - from the Biblical Matthew, a publican and usurer before he met Jesus at the … er … tax office … I know, it's amazing who you bump into in those places).

Delightful.
I am almost glad I cannot afford to live there. Almost, but not quite, as just around the corner is the best ice cream shop in all of France (although their prices live up to the regrattiers' grippe-sou reputation).

Happy Friday, peeps.