Basket

This morning's wild goose chase was triggered by the phrase 'des fauteuils à la corbeille', in the context of a première at a famous theatre, in the course of the Maigret story at reference 1. With fauteuils being chairs and corbeilles being baskets and with the problem being whether the baskets bound to the chairs, making them a particular sort of chair or whether the baskets bound to the preceding verb.

The chase centred on the various meanings of corbeille, from where I was led to anse, a handle of some sort, where I was particularly amused by the phrase 'faire danser l'anse du panier' which seems to mean claiming that you spent rather more than you actually spent when doing someone else's shopping for them; the sort of thing that urban servants were all too likely to get up to, particularly when they were on the way out, after the first world war - a problem which Agatha probably knew all about. Literally, to make the handle of the shopping basket dance.

On the way I discovered that the word usually used for office, bureau, was also used to describe the computer screen with its various bars and icons that you get with systems like Microsoft's Windows and that the corbeille was the recycle bin thereon.

Also that bureau was so named for the coarse woollen cloth used to cover the coarse wooden tables originally used for desks in 14th century Italy. Not that my Elementary Latin Dictionary (from the famous C. T. Lewis, of the even more famous Lewis & Short) admits any such word.

In the end, I decide that we are talking about two different areas in the theatre, the stalls and the basket. With Larousse claiming that the basket was the area immediately above the orchestra pit, a claim which is not supported by the snap above.

PS: the snap above is taken from the online booking system for the Salle Richelieu of the Comédie-Française in Paris. Not the way that we do such things at all.

Reference 1: Pietr-le-Letton Simenon - 1929. Volume I of the collected works.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/withdrawal-symptoms.html. Now on the second read of this first story, second time around.