Here are some French words you will meet on your travels, mainly in the British newspapers and magazines.
Imagine your petite travel writer, tired of bureaucracy, sits at her bureau, beside her portmanteau, and tries to write the prologue to her roman de clé, using her nom de plume.
bureau - desk (or office)
bureaucracy - paperwork and offices doing time wasting paperwork
nom de plume - pen name
petite - Small (feminine) - the masculine is petit
pique - excite, arouse - middle French from the Latin - see dictionary.com which gives the origin of words
portmanteau - bag for carrying goods
prologue - first word, beginning of a book or explanation in advance of main chapter one, foreword
roman de clé - mystery novel
I shall now go and write the epilogue. (Afterword, a bit like those last words scrolling up the screen of a film based on a true story telling you what happened the villain and the heroine.)
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