L'esprit d'escalier

Well, when I copied down the phrase 'l'esprit d'escalier', I apparently wrote it down wrong--according to Wikipedia, it should be 'l'esprit de l'escalier'. Now I have to go look at my copy of 'Death: The High Cost of Living' and see if it's wrong in there, because that's where I got it.
[EDIT] That is how it's written in 'Death', so either Neil Gaiman got it wrong too, or both versions are technically correct.

Either way.

This is a Christmas present for my sister Rachel, even though I really like it and I really want to keep it for myself. I did my best to copy the style of Mucha, which I adore, but it's very simple because the more intricate I tried to make it the worse it got, and I finally just left it. The sketch took about four hours, plus probably two hours of drawing a line, erasing the line, drawing it again, drawing another line, erasing both, etc etc etc. Painted with watercolor, which took about seven or eight hours (I only know this because I know that I watched at least six episodes of Firefly while working on it). I had to scan it in two bits, because the scanner cut off all of the text at the bottom, which is why there's a line. Sorry about that *sigh*

The lovely lady is, as usual, Lockstock [link] who is the absolute queen of beautiful, functional stock.

"L'esprit d'escalier" or 'L'esprit de l'escalier" means 'the wit of the staircase', and according to Wikipedia was "Originally a witticism of Diderot, the French encyclopedist, in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien:

This combination of words was first used in order to describe a situation when a person offended by somebody at a party just grumbled instead of giving a proper, defending answer, getting, as a result, in even more silly position and thus being "forced" to leave the party; and here it comes the "stairs" word — while the annoyed was going down the stairs that "brilliant" answer just popped-up in his mind, nevertheless it was too late. "

So basically it means 'the clever comebacks you come up with too late'. I wanted to put some random French phrase on the picture to mimic all of the Mucha paintings that were done for advertisements with French slogans on them, and I picked this one because 1) Rachel is a huge fan of Neil Gaiman and especially Neil Gaiman's character Death and 2) Rachel is full of delayed comebacks.

I even came up with a story to tie in the figure with the slogan--she is the muse of l'esprit d'escalier, which explains her expression. If you complain because she's always late and never there when you need her, she'll just stare at you and say "Whaaaaaaaaat? It's not my fault you can't be clever on your own." I mean, you know that she's busy watching Days of Our Lives, which is way more important than helping you look good.

Anyway. Happy Christmas, Rachel! yay