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OP from John Bayley's "Iris: a memoir of Iris Murdoch":
[Iris] herself was devoted at that time to the adventures of Tintin, the perky young Belgian 'boy reporter' invented by Herge … I have learnt a lot of French from the Tintin books, mostly idioms now outdated, which we used to repeat to each other on suitable occasions. There was a moment when the villains had hired a diver to go down and attach a limpet mine to the good characters' ship. Just as he is fixing it the anchor happens to be released from up above, banging him on the head and knocking him and his mine down into the depths. 'Fichu metier!' he remarks philosophically into his diving helmet. A comment whose pithiness is as intranslatable as poetry.
Rough translation, anybody?
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