Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - The fires of Paris

Original Title: "Les feux de Paris"
Text: Louis Aragon

Year: 1994

Always when to the obscene mornings
Between the legs of the Seine
Like a drowned woman with crazy eyes
From the mist of your poems
The Saint-Louis Island is rising pallid
Baudelaire I think of you

When I learned to see things
Oh slowliness of the metamorphosis
It's your Paris I saw
It was required for Paris to change
Like the oranges turn blue
The whole length of my life

But to seek those adventures
The city threw its belt away
of walls of herbs and of wind
She painted her landscape
Like a girl does of her face
To seduce a new lover

Nothing is at the same place no more
And the water of the Wallace fountains
Cries after the merchants of wafers
Who were shouting Pleasure Ladies
When the pianos were practising scales
In the lounges for outfits

Where are the big tapestry makers
The reed pipes in the dust
Where are the weddings in songs
Where are the mules of Réjane
One does not go on donkey's back
To have lunch in the grass at Robinson's

What good can it do to you
One does not choose his hell
Backward what's the point to search
That the past consumes itself without you
It's here that your fate lights up
One does not choose his bonfire

With your steps the clouds move
Go away in the street with the red eye
The world bleeds in front of you
You walk in a barbarian day
The present time is burning in the Snackbars
Its purple dawn is on the roofs

To hell with the lunar beauty
And the millenial darkness
Spotlight on the Champs-Elysées
Here is the new carnival
Where electricity gives a facelift to
The edifices set ablaze

Spotlight on the man and on the woman
On the Louvre and on Notre-Dame
From the Sacré-Coeur to the Panthéon
Spotlight from the Concorde to the Ternes
Spotlight on the modern universe
Spotlight on our soul with neon

Spotlight on the darkness of the dreams
Spotlight on the arts of lies
Burn perpetual summer
Burn of our human flame
And that everywhere our hands bring back
The sun of the truth.

all poems written by Louis Aragon