The French syntagma 'peur bleue' (blue fear) - conveying the meaning "very frightened, scared" - was created by Emile Zola and used in his novel 'L'Assommoir' (The Kill, 1877). The various adjectives used by Zola as qualifiers for 'peur' are tabulated, and formal and semantic analyses of 'peur bleue' are conducted. The syntagma's metaphorical basis is examined and its status as a locution/phraseme is tested by applying a set of selective criteria. It is concluded that 'peur bleue' is a metonymy-based locution. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (Z. Dubiel in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 2)