Danse Macabre

Abstract

The French wordmacabrewas first used as an ordinary adjective by the French Romantic writers of the last century: Théophile Gautier and Petrus Borel say ‘c'est macabre’ for anything lugubriously grotesque. Sachs quotesfantaisie macabrefrom Émile Montégut. The word was not included in theDictionnaire de l'Académie Française(1694) up to the seventh edition of 1878, but is now to be found in the eighth in the connectionsdanse macabre, récit macabre, plaisanterie macabre. Bal macabre is not recorded, but often used. In the printers' craft-languagemacabreis said to be used for aMort, that is, the accidental omission of one or more words of a text by the compositor. The medical students and servants of the dissecting rooms at the French universities call the bodies dissectedles macabres. The bargees on the Seine employ the word for corpses seen drifting on the water. Parisian grave-diggers call the bodies of the poor people buried at minimum costmauvais macabés. In the Auvergnat patois, [chant] macabre is a bag-piper's melody. In the Bergamask dialect macabret is said to mean the Devil-an easy transition from ‘Death.’ In Cervières (Burgundy) a certain sword-dance is calledBachuber, obviously either a wrong transcription of an aurally recordedmacuberor a local mispronunciation of an adopted word. Macabre is found as a loan-word in English, Dutch, and German: Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish.