Chez Ma Tante

A French euphemism for something that has been pawned – literally, “at my aunt’s.”

Reporting on a recession-driven fillip for Paris’s state-owned pawnbroker, Le Crédit Municipal, Angelique Chrisafis wrote in The Guardian:

500 desperate Parisians a day drop off items ranging from jewelery to haute couture dresses, fur coats and violins, still using the old euphemism “chez ma tante” after a 19th-century adventurer who pawned his watch but told his mother he had left it “at my aunt’s.”†

According to Chrisafis:

Paris’s 17th-century public pawnbroker is now enjoying a revival in the financial crisis. Not just low-income families queuing to raise cash on their possessions, but bankers, journalists, lawyers and company directors pawning clocks, jewelery, stamp collections and paintings to stay afloat.

Next week the state pawnbroker, Le Crédit Municipal, will hold its first auction of pawned grand cru wines, which often attract four-figure price tags, after broadening its rules to accept alcohol in exchange for loans.

Commenting on the trend of pawning Chateau Lafite rather than art or antiques, the director of Le Crédit Municipal observed:

“It’s easier for someone to go into his cellar and bring us some good bottles of wine than to take down the paintings in the dining room or remove his wife’s necklace.”

† In March 1898, The Times gave a more detailed account of the origin of the phrase “chez ma tante”:

When the Prince de Joinville was very young his mother, the Queen, wife of King Louis Philippe, gave him a gold watch. One day the Queen, not seeing it, asked the young Prince where it was. “Oh,” he replied, “elle est chez ma tante,” (“it is at my aunt’s.”) They ran to the Princess Adelaide’s palace, but no trace was found of the watch. The Prince finally confessed that he had visited the mont-de-piété, (the State pawnbroker.) The phrase “chez ma tante” soon became popular.