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Updated: June 16, 2025
These are tame days when we have forgotten how to make Cock-Ale. They drank 'Sack with Clove-gilly-flowers' at the "Mermaid," I am sure. What is Bragot? What is Stepony? And what Slipp-coat Cheese? Ask the baker for a Manchet. The old names call for a Ballade. Où sont les mets d'antan?
The French Theatre is no more, and Delmonico's is no longer at that Fourteenth-street corner, and Her Highness Mademoiselle Tostée is dead, and M. Offenbach's sprightly tunes have had the fate of all over-popular airs, and are forgotten now. Où sont les neiges d'antan?
Over the door appeared the name, "Villa d'Antan," in small gold letters. I asked myself what poet or what fairy was living there, what inspired, solitary being had discovered this spot and created this dream house, which seemed to nestle in a nosegay. A workman was breaking stones up the street, and I went to him to ask the name of the proprietor of this jewel.
Where is that fruitage now, where in particular are the peaches d'antan? where the mounds of Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our childhood seems to have been steeped?
Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? Surely they have been settling, flake on flake, year after year, in Mrs. Talbot's linen-press, till at last there is quite a snowdrift of fair white linen for Jenny and Theophil to lie in.
Slang, whether the public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it. That exquisite and celebrated verse Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? But where are the snows of years gone by? is a verse of slang.
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