My Fair Cabbage

Reuters reported on a new film dedicated to the British royal family, The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Dame Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II. The film has just been screened at the Venice Film Festival and is based on extensive research, resulting in what is described as ‘a realistic dramatisation’.

The realism goes along with a plenty of humour, the report says, ‘particularly when dramatising scenes of intimacy between the queen, Prince Philip, Charles and her mother.

“Move over, cabbage,” Philip says as the couple go to bed, and the queen dons a woolly dressing gown and clutches a hot water bottle on the night Diana is killed‘. (Reuters 2 September 2006).

It is, of course, very funny to have Her Majesty being called a “cabbage”. However, this is exactly what the French call their beloved. ‘Mon petit chou’ (my little cabbage) is a famous French expression of love and affection. The English equivalents to this lovely French phrase are hopelessly simple – “sweetheart”, “sweetie”, or “honey”.

In the context of the film, what may have been intended to look like an odd sign of affection is actually a literal translation into English of the French idiom. So, Prince Philip does in fact speak the language of love – however funny it may sound.