This was the fanciest, and oldest, of the track-side signs we saw ... it warns that: you [in the formal, or plural, this French "you"] must not cross [the tracks] without looking in both directions [because] one train can HIDE [CACHER] another. The first summer that we noticed the sign was 1994, and it became a phrase we all knew and used, sometimes seriously, sometimes not. Trains in France were frequent and wonderful. My husband was only made uncomfortable once, when we rode the TGV (tres grand vitesse, or very fast/big speed) that began in a small city in the Poitou-Charentes. "It feels like an airplane that never leaves the runway," he said. But one moment we were in the midst of beautiful yellow fields of colza (a crop which would become cooking oil) and the next we had arrived in a high-ceilinged railway station in Paris.
We don't have too many uses for the saying here ... but I have been moving my paintings and prints around a lot, and we have now been here long enough that the boards I paint on are acquiring their own (mostly hidden, by other paintings) painted life. Un (painting) peut en cacher un autre:
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