“ ‘I must be patient, by the Lord! of course I must . . . and I have been . . . Still, I mustn’t, either, show the energy of a jelly-fish!’

The journalist, who delighted in the daring colloquialisms of modern slang, need have had no fear of ever being credited with energy of that flabby sort.”

(Marcel Allain, Fantômas Captured, trans. A. R. Allinson (1926), p. 119)