Hello,
Happy reading
A holy simpleton
A woman who plays the prude
A person who plays innocent, trying to hide their flaws
A hypocrite
If you carefully examine your calendar, you will notice that there is no day dedicated to Saint Nitouche. Is it because she has been completely forgotten?
Not really, because unless her parents wanted to punish her from the moment of her birth, no female baby has ever been named Nitouche.
For a person to be canonized, it is imperative that they have led an exemplary, irreproachable life (not to mention the requirement of having performed at least two miracles). And among the things they must absolutely not have done was, of course, to indulge in the abominable sin of flesh outside of marriage or with partners other than their spouse.
Our holy nitouche would therefore be a very virtuous woman, sexually untouchable; she would be a woman about whom one could say “you don’t touch her” or, phonetically, “you nitouche her.”
Ironically, a saint nitouche is therefore a person who plays the virtuous, the prudish, who claims not to want to “get involved,” to the point that she could be canonized later, but who deceives no one.
By extension, the term applies to people who try to hide their flaws and play innocent.
It was in the sixteenth century that the expression appeared, among others in Rabelais's Gargantua.
When she came back out, she delicately brushed her clothes, smoothed her wrinkled dress over her hips, and walked back down the hallway with the same coquettish airs and the same look of saintly innocence.
Thomas Wolfe – The Time and the River: A Chronicle of Youth and Its Hunger – 1984
The prudish attitude is baroque. It is often that of women who have something to reproach themselves for and who want to deflect suspicions. The type of the saintly nitwit is well known.
Léon Daudet - Woman and Love - 1930
Have a good day
Marylena