enfant terrible

plural enfants terribles

1. An unconventional badly-behaved person who causes embarrassment or shock to others.

   He was soon the talk of the town, the enfant terrible of our little world.

   2010, Peter Coleman, Quadrant, March 2010, No. 464 (Volume LIV, Number 3), Quadrant Magazine Limited, page 86

   Synonyms: terrible infant

2. An unusually successful person who is strikingly unorthodox, innovative, or avant-garde.

   The clip shows the 67-year-old enfant terrible of French letters in pyjamas lying on a bed next to a woman in a nightie, smoking and laughing.

   2023 March 28, Philip Oltermann, “Michel Houellebecq sex film to be released despite attempt to stop it”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

   1 more example

   Diplomatists have no right to complain of mere lies; it is their own fault, if, educated as they are, the lies deceive them; but they complain bitterly of traps. Palmerston was believed to lay traps. He was the enfant terrible of the British Government.

   1918, Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

3. literallyobsoleteA wild child.

   “A perfect cherub” she pronounced it the first day, but an “enfant terrible” before the week was over, for the young hero rioted by day, howled by night, ravaged the house from top to bottom, and kept his guardians in a series of panics by his hairbreadth escapes.

   1876, Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom