Sauver les meubles

Literally: To save the furniture

Example: “Le parti a perdu la région, mais il a sauvé les meubles dans les grandes villes.” — The party lost the region, but it salvaged what it could in the big cities.

Origin: A 19th-century metaphor that needs no unpacking: with the water rising or the fire spreading and nobody in danger, the reflex is to get out whatever can still be got out. What is worth knowing is how much meubles once covered. In the 12th century the word meant any movable property — biens meubles, as against immovable ones — which took in clothes, weapons and livestock as readily as the things we now call furniture. Only in the 17th century did it narrow to what stands in your rooms.