Mockery
The city residents mocked the nuns by calling them "les grises" – a phrase meaning both "the grey women" and "the drunken women", in reference to the color of their attire and d'Youville's late husband, François-Magdeleine You d’Youville (1700–1730), a notorious bootlegger. Marguerite d'Youville and her colleagues adopted the particular black and brown dress of their religious institute in 1755: despite a lack of grey colour, they kept the nickname once used to spite them.
Read more about this topic: Grey Nuns
Famous quotes containing the word mockery:
“It seemed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in water drops!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)