In October, Nicolas Sarkozy took with him to prison a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Its hero, Edmond Dantès, was imprisoned in the Château d’If for 14 years. Mr Sarkozy was in for 20 days.
In his instant memoir, Journal d’un prisonnier, he says the food was horrible. Yet, ‘neither wishing nor knowing how to cook’, he left the hotplate in the cell untouched, even though a former chief of staff had taken the trouble to provide written instructions on how to boil an egg. He relied on yoghurt, cereal bars, apple juice and ‘quelques douceurs sucrées’. These are translated into English as ‘sweet treats’.
I have an aversion to the jangling phrase sweet treat. It embodies the doctrine that a cake, pudding or sweetmeat may only be consumed as an exceptional treat, yet at the same time, their consumers believe that they can treat themselves, as though buying themselves a birthday present.
Sweet treat has not yet found its own place in the OED, although the phrase is used there in the definition of the chiefly Australian or New Zealand word crackle, which, since 1937, has meant ‘a sweet treat made by combining a crunchy breakfast cereal with chocolate’. The nub of the word treat was originally its gratuitousness. As for sweets, they could be part of a meal. In Sketches by Boz, Dickens described the effects on a repast of the shaking of a General Steam Navigation Company paddle steamer: ‘The sweets shook and trembled, till it was quite impossible to help them.’ These were served before the cloth was removed and the dessert brought in. In the 20th century sweet became, in the terminology of the linguistician Alan S.C. Ross, the non-U alternative to the U pudding. Hence the three non-U indicators in half a line of John Betjeman’s poem ‘How to Get on in Society’: ‘Is trifle sufficient for sweet?’ How Betjeman would have loved putting sweet treat on the lips of the tin-eared.
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