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Petard   /pˈɛtərd/  /pətˈɑd/   Listen
Petard

noun
1.
An explosive device used to break down a gate or wall.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Petard" Quotes from Famous Books



... the Maaseyk Town-Baths have shut their gates on him; desperately conjuring him, "Respite for a few hours, till we send to Liege for instructions!" But it was to no purpose. "Unbolt, IHR HERREN; swift, or the petard will have to do it!" Borck publishes his Proclamation, a mild-spoken rigorous Piece; signifies to the Maaseyk Authorities, That he has to exact a Contribution of 20,000 thalers (3,000 pounds) here, Contribution payable in three days; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... gestures. Not a muscle stirred! Whereupon Lemaitre seemed to break down utterly under his grief, let go of the body, and it fell hard upon the stage like an inert mass. The effect was superb. The whole house applauded, the bravos became frantic, the great actor was hoist with his own petard. Lemaitre passed the night in solemn reflection on the seriousness of the case. The result was that at the next representation, while carrying in his little dead brother, he delicately tickled him under the arms. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... time, and went and tried again till I managed my task, having to take great care that I did not hoist myself with my own petard, for it was a terribly dangerous engine that I was setting, though I ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... governments fulfil just two functions: the first is at home to act as a strong police force, to keep the ring in which the strong are beating down the weak; the second is to act as a piratical body-guard abroad, a petard to explode the doors which lead to the markets of the world: markets at any price abroad, uninterfered-with privilege, falsely called laissez-faire, {1} at any price at home, to provide these is the sole business of a government such as our industrial captains have been ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... But on the whole he was self-taught, and a self-taught man is never educated. Without intercourse with other living minds, education is impossible. This is indeed hoisting De Lammenais with his own petard. For, according to "Traditionalism," the mind is paralyzed by isolation, and can be duly developed only in society. An overweening self-confidence and slight regard for the labours of other thinkers usually characterizes self-taught genius. This it was that led him to cut ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... his head into our tent-door, and favored us with the few observations we had lost by reason of our hasty departure. Keifer turned his face to the wall and groaned. Poor man! he had been hoisted by his own petard. I think Uncle Jacob suspected that the young men had set up a job ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... fallen. Once, Ford thought he heard groans from the black shadow where the fat cook had disappeared, but he could not be sure. On the other side of the private car, and half-way between it and the forty-thousand-pound load of high explosives, the petard oyster-tin lay undisturbed, with the carving-knife sticking in the sand ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... the man: it was M'Guire, the most chivalrous of creatures, but not himself expert in our contrivances. Hence the necessity of our meeting; for I need not remind you what enormous issues depend upon the nice adjustment of the engine. I set our little petard for half an hour, the scene of action being hard by; and, the better to avert miscarriage, employed a device, a recent invention of my own, by which the opening of the Gladstone bag in which the bomb was carried should instantly determine the explosion. M'Guire was somewhat dashed by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... some say in where it should go. Third, the fact that I steer it into the hands of someone I'd prefer to get it tickles my sense of humor. The trapper trapped; the bopper bopped; the sapper hoist by his own petard." ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... forwarding, while the traveller enjoyed (to him an exquisite gratification) the amusement of countermining as fast as Bulmer could mine, and had in prospect the pleasing anticipation of blowing up the pioneer with his own petard. For this purpose, as soon as Touchwood learned that his house was to be applied to for the original deeds left in charge by the deceased Earl of Etherington, he expedited a letter, directing that only the copies should be sent, and thus ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... a lawyer with a hypothetical question. It's rather hoisting him on his own petard, as it were. However, I'll answer it. In the first place, if I planned to go into the business of looting the public domain I would conspire with some prominent official of the State Land Office to institute ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... you!" cried Fandor. "Here's a go! What a pretty petard in prospect!... Jacques Dollon was innocent; you arrest him; he is so terrified that he hangs himself! Well, old boy, I must say you make some fine blunders on ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... what is most particularly desired at Charleston, and, I believe, throughout the Cotton States. Certainly, when I was there, the war-party, the party of the "Mercury," was not in the ascendant, unless in the sense of having been "hoist with its own petard" when it cried out for immediate hostilities. Not only Governor Pickens and his Council, but nearly all the influential citizens, were opposed to bloodshed. They demanded independence and Fort Sumter, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... and collected in the six volumes of his Elements de Litterature (1787), were full of instruction for his own time, delicate and just in observation, as they often were, if not penetrating or profound. In his earlier Poetique Francaise—"a petard," said Mairan, "laid at the doors of the Academy to blow them up if they should not open"—he had shown himself strangely disrespectful towards the fame of Racine, Boileau, and the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... added a great load of anxiety to what I already suffered. It was plain that she had not slept; equally plain that she had wept copiously. She sighed, she groaned, she drew in her breath, she shook her head, as she waited on table. In short, she seemed in so precarious a state, like a petard three times charged with hysteria, that I did not dare to address her; and stole out of the house on tiptoe, and actually ran downstairs, in the fear that she might call me back. It was plain that this degree of tension could not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the distant lights, nor the prayer I said that I might not shame my race, nor how my heart beat when Henry, who was that day twenty-seven years old, gave the order to advance in the voice of one going to a ball. Two men with a petard—then a strange invention—led the way through the gloom, attended by ten picked soldiers. After them came fifty of the King's guards, and the King with two hundred foot; then the main body of a thousand. We had the long bridge with its three gates to pass; and beyond these obstacles, a city ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... miserable, canting peasant-woman upstairs has arranged it all. No doubt she consulted her priests. I must regain my self-respect. Let her die first." I heard him make a dash for the foot of the stairs. I was appalled; yet to think of Therese being hoisted with her own petard was like a turn of affairs in a farce. A very ferocious farce. Instinctively I unlocked the door. Dona Rita's contralto laugh rang out loud, bitter, and contemptuous; and I heard Ortega's distracted screaming as if under torture. "It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!" I hesitated just ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made him laugh more and more. "Oh, it serves him right," he said. "Don't you see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He's in ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... contemplated was the bursting of the Catholicity of the Anglican Church, that is, my subjective idea of that Church. Its bursting would not hurt her with the world, but would be a discovery that she was purely and essentially Protestant, and would be really the "hoisting of the engineer with his own petard." And this was the ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... silence, and the column formed up. The sappers ran on ahead, laid the powder bag, and masked it, then a sergeant of sappers lighted the match and shrank back behind a projecting bit of wall. Bang! The mask of the petard just grazed our heads, and one side of the gate lay on the ground. At the same moment firing began in the direction of Parseval's column. "Forward! God save the King!" We caught sight of the guard at the gate bolting off, and then lost it in the fog. There wasn't a cat in the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... reawakened patriotism. The slaveholders ventured everything on their last stake, and lost. A North, for the first time, sprang into being; and it issued, like Minerva from the brain of Jove, full-armed. The much-vaunted engineer, Beauregard, was "hoist with his own petard." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various



Words linked to "Petard" :   explosive device



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