Small rat
See also: Rat (homonymy)
In the beginning, a small rat designates a young pupil of the school of Danse of the Opéra of Paris which appears in the spectacles.
The term of rat , attested at Honore de Balzac and Théophile Gautier, gave place to several attempts at explanation: attached to the school Slang, it belongs to the expensive Métaphore S animalist with the romantic (once its finished studies, the “rat” becomes “tiger”). Another etymology, nonexclusive of the first, in fact a apheresis of “young lady of aperture ruffle ”.
Nestor Roqueplan, fine observer of the life of the Opera in the middle of the 19th century, thus described the rat:
- “ the true Rat, in good language, is a seven little girl to fourteen years, raises dance, which carry shoes used by others, shawls faded, hats color of soot, which feels the smoke of quinquet, has bread in its pockets and requires six pennies to buy candies; the made rat of the holes to decorations to see the spectacle, runs to the full gallop behind the backdrops and plays four corners of the corridors; it is supposed to gain twenty pennies per evening, but by means of the enormous fines that it incurs by its disorders, it touches per month only eight to ten francs and thirty kicks of his mother ” ( the News with the hand , 1840).
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