‖ Pays du Tendre
(pei dy tɑ̃dr)
Also with lower-case initials.
[ad. Fr. pays de Tendre, with ref. to Tendre, an imaginary country whose topography symbolized aspects of love, devised by Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) in her novel Clélie (1654–60).]
Matters concerning love; the ‘region’ of the affections.
| 1910 W. J. Locke Simon viii. 113 A crock..with one foot in the grave has no business to put the other into the Pays du Tendre. 1913 ― Stella Maris xv. 200 Herold..adventured with her into the Land of Tenderness—the Pays du Tendre of the old French romanticists. 1938 Times Lit. Suppl. 15 Jan. 43/3 The heroine's first excursion into the pays du tendre ends abruptly with the young man's betrothal to another girl. 1939 Ibid. 1 July 387/2 Mastery of this familiar type in the pays du tendre..is a handsome equipment for story-telling. a 1976 A. Christie Autobiogr. (1977) iv. i. 168 The art of flirtation..was an approximation, I think, to what the old troubadours called ‘le pays du tendre’. |