“Thee” and “thou” in “The Lord of the Rings”

[Faramir Jones]

I was very interested in your comment, Pitchwife, about the usage by a particular French couple of the formal 'vous' between each other, rather than the intimate 'tu':

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

Some never do - like Sartre and Beauvoir, who I think vouvoyed each other all their lives. But then they were French, and the French are weird in that respect anyway - they even talk to God like that.

There's a excellent example I've come up against, that I've used to explain to non-French speakers the difference in usage between 'tu' and 'vous'. Napoleon Bonaparte, general and future First Consul and Emperor of the French, married as his first wife, Josephine de Beauharnais. He was passionately in love with her, she far less with him. When he was fighting in Italy in 1796, he sent her frequent and passionate letters; hers were far less frequent and passionate. What particularly angered him was her insistence in refering to him with the formal 'vous'. In one letter, he said the following:


If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love.

Yet in your letter of the 23rd, and 26th. Ventose, you call me vous. Vous yourself!

Ah! wretch, how could you have written this letter? How cold it is?

And then there are those four days between the 23rd, and the 26th.; what were you doing that you failed to write to your husband? ...

Ah, my love, that vous, those four days made me long for my former indifference. Woe to the person responsible!

May he as punishment and penalty, experience what my convictions and the evidence (which is in your friend's favor) would make me experience!

Hell has no torments great enough! Nor do the Furies have serpents enough! Vous! Vous!