Puce Puce Puce is a dark red or purple brown color, a brownish purple or a "dark reddish brown." "Puce" is the French word for "flea". The color is said to be the color of bloodstains on linen or bedsheets, even after being laundered, from a flea's droppings, or after a flea has been crushed. The "Oxford English Dictionary" ("OED") dates the first English use of "puce" as a color to 1778. The name comes from the French word "puce", or flea, which comes from the Latin words for flea, "pulicem" or "pulex". According to the "Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology",
Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way in the Rocky Mountains" that was part of the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Issue, and reprinted a century later. A Currier and Ives print from 1868 uses the same title and theme for a very different print, showing a railroad crossing a new settlement as the train goes west. A and a stereograph by Alexander Gardner, both of an 1867 end-of-track frontier construction train, were titled "Westward The Course of Empire Takes Its Way". David Foster Wallace named one of his short stories "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" in his 1989 collection "Girl with Curious Hair". Early revisions of