My current writing project references The Three Musketeers a lot, so I’ve been rereading my own archive here on Negative Space. In the process I’ve been fixing errors. Most of them are obvious. This weekend I ran across the following exchange between d’Artagnan and his lackey Planchet in A Family Affair:

“Well!” cried D’Artagnan, “tell us all about it.”

“Dame, that’s a long job, monsieur.”

In context it seemed like an odd typo for “damn”, but before fixing it I thought I ought to look for confirmation. A quick Google search on the text absent the “dame” found a page full of entries all with the strange word.

Well, perhaps they all come from the same original source. Mine came from an early online source, probably the On-line Book Initiative.

I looked it up in my paperback version—I already knew my paperback and the online version are from different translations—and their translation used “Lord”, which sounds more appropriate:

“Lord, monsieur, that’s a long job.”

I also have a paperback in the original French. In that book, the word appears verbatim:

— Dame! c’est bien long, Monsieur

Is my paperback’s translator right? While it makes sense in context, I have never heard “Dame” used to mean anything other than “Lady” in French. A Google translate query of the original French came back with:

Lady! It is very long, sir.

Which, besides being oddly suggestive is completely out of character for Planchet. It is, however, the translation I expected. Was Lady some strange expletive in French in the time of Dumas, as it sometimes seems to be in old movies in English? I did a Hail-Mary Google search on “dame French exclamation” and got:

Dame! which must not be confounded with the feminine substantive dame (=lady), is the abbreviation of Dame-Dieu, an Old French exclamation equivalent to Seigneur Dieu (=Lord God). We constantly find in medieval texts: que Dame-Dieu nous aide! (=the Lord God help us!). Dame-Dieu, and simply Dame (that is to say, Lord God), was used as an interjection; and the exclamation Ah! dame (=ah! well), which, nowadays, has lost all meaning, signifies really Ah! Seigneur! (=ah! Lord!). The word dame is still found in the geographical names Dammartin, Dampierre, etc., which signify the Lord Martin, the Lord Peter, etc.

So that’s it. It was a contraction of an expletive already old in Dumas’s time from a word that no longer even existed in French. In English it makes no sense to copy it directly; it needs its meaning translated. The translator who chose to give up and include the word verbatim, even though it matched a word in English, made a poor choice, in my opinion. Nowadays, of course, with the Internet, the research is a lot easier to perform.