It's the most beautiful night
Since the beginning of times
It's Christmas night
The night of a poor kid
Of Jesus, son of God
Who came down on earth
So that the anxious hearts
are not lonely anymore
So that the peace of the world
Arrives and that down here
Hope, charity
Comes to guide our steps
Oh joy of Bethleem
Thank you for your light
Which changes in one day
The face of the earth
Christmas! Christmas!
Jesus is born!
It's the most beautiful night of the year
Christmas! Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!
Jesus is eternal!
Worker for the Lord
Among the workers
Only leaving your work
To go pray
My God of Nazareth
With a tranquil childhood
Jesus you are going to grow up
Humble, sweet and docile.
The house of your Father
is the temple of God
It's there that you promise
The Kingdom of Heaven
To those who will follow you
And that finally you forgive
While dieing on the Cross
All the sins of men.
Christmas! Christmas!
Jesus is born!
It's the most beautiful night of the year
Christmas! Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!
Jesus is eternal!
I am not God's fool anymore
High verb and hands in the pockets
I lost track of the good Lord
One morning behind the post office
Life does not have that look of a woman
And her wide open blouse
And her tenderness and her warmth
And all my love is in a bad way
I am now without star
Sensitive to the cold in my coat of pride
Beating the air of a boastful verb
And I mend my ankle socks
Life does not have that chest anymore
The breasts where I was running bare feet
The rump where my twenty years old were rolling
And that belly heavy and tranquil
It does not have that face so delicate
Those eyes of a curly haired princess
With that endless song to the lips
Delicate and sweet and strong and forceful
I have at the bottom of myself a dead God
Who still dreams and smiles
I won't do the pretty heart
Under the windows of life
And yet I still sing
My song of love and pride
Against the reason of the toads
One has to die alive all the same
And here is life which comes back
With its loving gait
With my blood rising inside of me
Like after a very long journey
The eyes, the evening and sweetness
The summer of that hair we fade
The sand with its powerful body
You will make me die of love
La la la.
Original Title: "La femme qui est dans mon lit"
Year: 1967
If you meet her, weirdly dressed
Dragging in the gutter an heel taken off
And the head and the eye low like a wounded pigeon
Sirs do not spit swearwords nor filth
To the painted face of that poor impur one
Who goddess Famine has one evening of winter
Forced to lift her petticoats in open air
That Bohemia is my good, my wealth
My pearl, my jewel, my queen
My Duchess
The woman who is in my bed, isn't twenty years old for a long time
The eyes rung by years, by loves day-to-day
The mouth worn out by kisses too often and too badly given
The bleak complexion despite the blusher more pale than a moon's spot
The woman who is in my bed, isn't twenty years old for a long time
The breasts so heavy of too much love do not wear the name of baits
The body weary, too caressed, too often, but badly loved
The back stooped seems to carry memories she had to run away from
The woman who is in my bed, isn't twenty years old for a long time
Don't laugh, don't touch her, keep your tears and your sarcasms
When night reunites us, her body, her hands offer themselves to mine
And its her heart covered with tears and wounds which reassures me.
Original Title: "La grande marée"
Text: Bernard Lavilliers
Year: 1981 (Vanderlove's version), 1975
An idol with feet of clay watches over the border
Kids with fragile hands play with the dirt
The widows with long feverish fingers distil the tea
An old man with tranquil eyes gets out of the smoke
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
A king paraylised by loneliness on his derisory throne
A coffee, a clock, a piece of sidewalk
A wake up sinister and funny on the shoulder of a worker
Who is going at the end of the mole, toward eternity
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
The kids playing under the shadow of the truncheons
The weather that is, six months of prison in Maniac
A star has fallen in my guitar
If I was a believer, it'd be a gift from the sky
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
The streets have no nooks anymore, no more dead angles
It eases the balance of powers
There are no lovers anymore, no public benches anymore
We are forever tanned
Our vocabulary is reduced to fifty words
We plug our sexes in the local supply
And our spermatozoids are calibrated and placed in banks
They serve as currency to the eunuchs who govern us
Our society of abundance is making marvels, there is only one class left
Though when reflecting upon it there is another one
But we are advised against thinking
We never make love anymore, except once in a while
With the wardens who watches over us
Mine is frigid.
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
It's the big tide, the big tide, the big tide
Original Title: "Ils s'allongent côte à côte"
Year: 1977
They lie down side by side,
Head turned toward the sky
Head turned toward the sky
Like they do for thirty years
Maybe they are already a little in the sky
Because of the peace surrounding them
As if they were in a small boat
Hear turned toward the sky
Around the house, the Virginia creeper
That he had planted the first day
Carries them and protects them
Or it's the night which protects them
and which carries them
And it's as if the evening
And every evening
They were going away
Toward God maybe
Who is like some sort of estuary
More luminous than the night in the night.
Misogyny aside, the wise man was right
There are the annoying ones, you can find plenty of them
They are pressing in a crowd.
There are the damned nuissances, a bit more refined
And then clearly the pick of the bunch
There are the buggeresses.
Mine, alone, bids higher over them all
She comes under the three categories at the same time
Genuine prodigy
Annoying, nuisance and buggeress as well
She passes, she goes past, she surpasses everything
She pisses me off, I'm telling you
My God, forgive me for those quite bitter words
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, she pisses me off,
She abuses, she oversteps the mark
She gets on my nerves and I regret my pretty loves with
The little children of Mary the bishop whispered to me
She pisses me off, I'm telling you
She pisses me off, she pisses me off,
And forces me to clean my nails before to confirm her ass
And yet, it's not callipygian
And charity only pushes my resigned hand
Toward that ass, killjoy, conical, sullen
She pisses me off, I'm telling you
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, I repeat it and when
She pats my belly, she keeps her gloves
And that offends me
Aside that it denotes of a serious lack of tact
It does not favour contact that much
She pisses me off, I'm telling you
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, when I fall on my knees
For some kind of devotions which are typically local
And which gives vertigo
Thinking it is time to sing the Creed
She opens wide her missal on my back
She gets on my nerves, I tell you
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, even during fornication
She gets bored stiff, she gets bored stiff with ostentation
She gets bored stiff, I tell you
Instead of shouting: "More! Come on! Come on!"
She declaims some Claudel, some Claudel that's what I said
Well then it freezes me!
She pisses me off, she pisses me off, I admit that that Claudel
is a man of genius, an immortal poet,
I recognise his prestige
But that one gets from his pious work
An aphrodisiac, no, that's clear utopia.
She pisses me off, I'm telling you
She pisses me off, I'm telling you
In Besançon that year,
A thousand men and women stood up.
Do we do verses with immediate news?
Poet, is it your role to testify for the birthing fire?
Can one write songs on those women
Who put themselves on Sunday² for eight months because it had to be shown
That we were respectable people
And that the strike, it's not carelessness it's strictness
Thus you make verses with the dignity of others
Poet, from your bedroom among your books
Is it fit to salute the working class
From far, when maybe, your verses, she would not understand anything to them?
You'll have to resign yourself to it
The spark it is not me
I go from town to town
I carry the fire, I am the blood
Oh young women, who came down on Besançon
That year, toward the fifteen August while carrying like a sacrifice
Your clamors because it was the first time and you were a big scared
I stay on the edge of you, shy, not daring to do anything
Can one do verses with the solemnity of your gestures and your honor?
You stood up
Suddenly you became the hope of the world
The hope of the world, you, small clothes-conscious ladies and ordinary,
without passion
The first day, one of you said "The strike will be long
It's with the feet in the snow that we'll end"
It's thus easy to make verses about courage and about fear
One makes verses with hope, with life
With nails clinging to the reality
With words which have been whispered to me that winter
In Besançon because the wind blows in the back of the poet
And riddles him with words which does not belong to him
² A saying to say that they weren't pay/took a pay leave.
Another version:
Have pity, have pity of me
At least, please, my friends
In grave I lie down, not under holy nor may
In that exile to which I am sent
By Fortune, like it was allowed by God
Girls liking young people and new
Dancers, jumpers, making the calf's foot²
Vivacious like javelins, sharp like stings
Ringing throat clear like bells³
Would you leave him there, the poor Villon?
Cantors singing at leisure, without law,
Gallants laughing, pleasing in facts and words,
Itinerant merchant going frank with fake gold, of alloy,
People of spirit, a little scatterbrain,
Resurrect too much because he dies in the meanwhile
Maker of lays, of motets and rondeaux,
When dead will be, you will make him chaudeaux*
Where he lays down, no lightning nor whirlwind enters
With thick walls his bandages have been made
Would you leave him there, the poor Villon?
Come to see him in that pitiful equipage
Noble men, free of quarter and tenth**,
Who hold nothing of Emperor nor King
But only of God of Paradise
To go without food he needs on Sundays and Tuesdays
Whose teeth has longer than rake
After dry bread, not after cakes
In his bowels pours water gushing out
Deep in ground, table has not nor trestles
Named princes, old, striplings,
Obtain me pardon and royal seals.
And carry me up in some basket
As the pigs do, to one another
Because, where one brays, they run away in a heap
Would you leave him there, the poor Villon?
²Lifting the leg of a comical way when dancing
³Cascaveaux could be the bells shaken to announce plague epidemics
*drink made of pouring warm milk over an egg
**apparently referring to tax and tithe
