Texture and condition

Just past the middle of the list sits de fortune, and an English reader who trusts the spelling will read it backwards. The phrase means makeshift: un abri de fortune is a shelter thrown together out of whatever was lying about, une réparation de fortune is a repair meant to hold until a proper one arrives. Nothing in either of them is expensive. What the French phrase keeps is the older sense of Latin fortuna, which was chance — what befalls somebody, well or badly — so de fortune means with whatever chance happened to provide. English took the same word and let the money swallow it: « a fortune » is a sum, « fortunate » is lucky in one direction only, and the old neutral sense survives in a handful of fossils — « soldier of fortune », « fortune-teller », « the fortunes of war » — none available for ordinary use. So « a shelter of fortune » says nothing at all in English, and the words to reach for are « makeshift » and « improvised », or « rough and ready » when it is the repair that is meant.