to curry favour: "flatter, seek favour by officious show of courtesy or kindness"

Through the miracle of association, which can lead you all sorts of places, I got to thinking about this rather wonderful and strange expression in English: to curry favour. I found, remarkably, that it has nothing to do with either Indian spices, or 'favour'. 

It all began while reading Les Trois Mousquetaires, when I recently came across some colourful verbs like 'ferrailler' and "étriller un cheval". Not knowing much about things equestrian, I wanted to find out the English for "étriller", which is (specialists might correct me) 'to curry', or 'to currycomb' a horse. This led in turn to wondering what brushing down a horse had to do with one of my favourite dishes, so I began an investigation into 'curry', and this is what I found in Skeat's exciting (no irony intended) etymological dictionary:

OF= Old French

Scand.= Scandinavian

Dan. = Danish

M.E. = Middle English

And online: (etymonline.com)

Late 13c., "to rub down a horse," from Anglo-French curreier "to curry-comb a horse," from Old French correier "put in order, prepare, curry," from con-, intensive prefix (see com-), + reier "arrange," from a Germanic source (see ready). Related: Curried; currying.

To curry favor "flatter, seek favor by officious show of courtesy or kindness" is an early 16c. folk-etymology alteration of curry favel (c. 1400) from Old French correier fauvel "to be false, hypocritical," literally "to curry the chestnut horse," chestnut horses in medieval French allegories being symbols of cunning and deceit. Compare German den falben (hengst) streichen "to flatter, cajole," literally "to stroke the dun-colored horse."

Old French fauvel (later fauveau) "fallow, dun," though the exact color intended in the early uses is vague, is a diminutive of fauve "fawn-colored horse, dark-colored thing, dull," for which see Fauvist. The secondary sense here is entangled with similar-sounding Old French favele "lying, deception," from Latin fabella, diminutive of fabula (see fable (n.)). In Middle English, favel was a common name for a horse, while the identical favel or fauvel (from Old French favele) meant "flattery, insincerity; duplicity, guile, intrigue," and was the name of a character in "Piers Plowman."

 

So 'favour' has nothing to do with 'favour', but with horses! But with associations of lying and deception. It means to 'stroke the chestnut (-coloured) horse'. 'Favour' is also, interestingly, entangled with the Latin 'fabella', as in 'Fable'. 

I don't know how accurate the idea of an acrostic is from the first letters of the seven deadly sins, but this is what I found on 'https://www.phrases.org.uk':

'Curry favour' comes down to us becuse of a mishearing of the second word. This was originally not 'favour' but 'favel'. John Palsgrave's 'L'esclarcissement de la langue françoyse' [The clarification of the French language], 1530, records a curryfavell as 'a flatterar'.

Favel comes from the 1310 poem by the French royal clerk Gervais du Bus - 'Roman de Fauvel' [The Romance of Fauvel]. That morality tale relates the story of Fauvel, an ambitious and vain horse, who deceives and corrupts the greedy leaders of church and state. The name Fauvel or Favvel, which is formed from 'fau-vel' (in English 'veiled lie'), is an acrostic made from the initial letters of a version of the seven deadly sins: flaterie (flattery/pride), avarice (greed/gluttony), vilanie (wrath), variété (inconstancy), envie (envy), and lacheté (cowardice). In the poem, the rich and powerful humiliate themselves by bowing down and stroking the coat of the false leader, that is, by 'currying Fauvel'.

Anyway, back to Dumas.