Léo Ferré - The sad song

Original Title: "La chanson triste"
Year: 1955

When sorrow knocks on your closed door
Give it fire for the sake of God
If your flame is dead and everything is resting
It'll go away I have not done better
If your flame is dead and everything is resting
It'll go away I have not done better

Flowers of my life were white roses
I've given them to all my friends
to pluck their petals under 4 planks
I'd have done better to decorate my life with them
to pluck their petals under 4 planks
I'd have done better to decorate my life with them

I had clothes made from clouds
I had hair like flags
And my well-behaved mane was floating to the wind
Then I have lost it all, there was nothing left but the skin
And my well-behaved mane was floating to the wind
Then I have lost it all, there was nothing left but the skin

I went away under ten feet of clay
Stuck face to face by a sky of wood
And telling my verses to my docile verses
Who would have rhymed me differently than I did
And telling my verses to my docile verses
Who would have rhymed me differently than I did

When sorrow knocks on your closed door
Give it fire for the sake of God
And the last rose would flare up
Which I'd go and pick up between two farewells
And the last rose would flare up
Which I'd go and pick up between two farewells

Alain Barrière - She was so pretty

Original Title: "Elle était si jolie"
Year: 1963 (France's Eurovision song)

She was so pretty that I did not dare loving her
She was so pretty I can't forget her
She was too pretty when the wind was taking her away
She was feeling, delighted, and the wind was telling me

She is way too pretty and you I know you
Love her a whole lifetime you will never be able to
Yes but she is gone, it's stupid but it's true
She was pretty, I will never forget

Today, autumn is here and I often cry
Today, autumn is here, how far the spring is
In the park where shiver the leaves under the ill wind
Her dress twirls then she disappears

She was so pretty that I did not dare loving her
She was so pretty I can't forget her
She was too pretty when the wind was taking her away
She was so pretty I will never forget

Les Compagnons de la Chanson - Bécaud - I belong to you

Original Title: "Je t'appartiens"
Text: Pierre Delanoë
Music: Gilbert Bécaud
Year: 1955, 1956 (Les compagnons de la Chanson's version)
The song was a hit and adapted to english to become the famous song "Let it be me"

Like clay
the fragile insect
the docile slave
I belong to you

Of my whole being
You are the only master
I have to submit
I belong to you

If you condemn
Throwing my soul
At the heart of the flames
I can't do anything about it

If you condemn
If you curse me
Here is my soul
Here are my hands

With the sorrows
Love and hate
Flowing in my veins
I belong to you

What can I do
To satisfy you
Lord of the earth
On my path

Like the angels
To sing the praises
But I am not angel
You know it well

I am nothing but a man
Nothing but a poor man
Who likes you
Like a buddy

Often I think
That in your immense
Palace of silence
You must be well

Sometimes I think
That in your immense
Palace of silence
We must be well

Gilbert Bécaud's version:

Claude Vinci - Paul Eluard - In Name of

Original Title: "Au nom"
Text: Paul Eluard (1943)
Year: 1963

In name of the perfect and deep forehead
In name of the eyes I am looking at
And the mouth I am kissing
For today and for ever
In name of the burried hope
In name of the tears in the dark
In name of the laughable complaints
In name of the laughs that scare
In name of the laughs in the street
Of the sweetness which binds our hands
In name of the fruits covering the flowers
On a good and beautiful earth
In name of the men in prison
In name of the deported women
In name of all our comrades
Martyred and massacred
For not having accepted the shadow
We have to drain wrath
And make the iron rise up
To preserve the high image
Of the innocent people hunted everywhere
And who will triumph everywhere

Léo Ferré - The memory and the sea

Original Title: "La mémoire et la mer"
Year: 1970, 1994 (Léotard's version)

The tide, I have it in the heart
Which comes in me again like a sign
I die of my little sister
Of my child and of my swan
A boat it depends on how
It is secured to the harbor, barely.
Some lightyears are crying down
from my firmament and I leave some behind
I'm the ghost of Jersey
the one that comes the evenings of show
Throwing at you the mist as kisses
And picking you up in his rhymes
Like the trammel of July
Where the lone wolf was glinting
The one I was seeing shine
At the fingers of sand of the earth

Remember that sea dog
That we were setting free on parole
And who barks like mad in the desert
Of wracks from some necropolis.
I'm sure that life is there
With its flannel lungs
When it cries of those weathers
The cold, all grey, which is calling us
I remember evenings over there
And sprints won over the foam
That slobber of the short-haired horses
At the level of the rocks which are wasting away
Oh the angel of lost pleasures
Oh rumor of an other habit
My desires from then on are nothing more
but a sorrow of my loneliness

And the devil of the conquered evenings
With his palenesses of rescue
And the shark of the paradises
In the environment wet with mosses
Come back green girl of the Fjords
Come back fiddle of the violin bands
In the harbor, the horns are clamoring
For the return of the comrades
Oh rare perfume of the salants
In the pepper fire of the chappings
When I was going while geometric-ing
My soul at the hollow of your wound
In the disorder of your ass
Nabbed in the sheets made of thin dawn
I was seeing one more stained glass window.

And you green girl, my spleen.

The sea shells acting a minor part
Under the broken liquid sunlights
Playing so much castanets
That it looked like Spain, livid
God of the granites have mercy
Of their vocation of finery
When the knife comes to interfere in
Their castanet figure
And I was seeing what one has a foreboding of
When we have a premonition of the glimpse
Between the shutters of the blood
And that the corpuscules represent
A blue mathematic
In that sea which is never slack
From which comes in again little by little towards me
That memory of the stars

That rumor coming from there
Under the friendly arc where I blind myself
Those hands which show off to me
Those ruminatning hands that moo
That rumor follows me for a long time
Like a beggar under the anathema
Like the shadow which loses its time
Drawing my theorem
And on my red make-up
Comes beating like a door
That rumor which goes standing
In the street filled with dead musics
It's over the sea, it's over
On the beach, the sand bleats
Like sheeps of infinite
When the shepherdess sea is calling me

Philippe Léotard's version:

Jacques Bertin - What Benoist says

Original Title: "Ce que dit Benoist"
Year: 1975

He also says that there was a crazy woman in the camp
A tall thin woman who was sleeping with the soldiers
The army had cut her husband's throat and burned her house
One day she gave birth to a still born child
She held him in her arms in silence while crying for a week
He says "As she is crazy, she has no God, no hatred"

How it feels good at your place
It's raining, I'm waiting for I do not know what

He says "I came out well, I believe I didn't kill anyone
The only thing I've lost in Algeria is my ability to revolt
It's not much for such a long journey"
He says that he is building alone a house for himself somewhere
He says "I remember a kid belly chopped by the bullets, who was looking at me
And then I also lost a small penknife I cared about"

How it feels good at your place
It's raining, I'm waiting for I do not know what

Léo Ferré - Your style

Original Title: "Ton style"
Year: 1971

All those shouts from the street, those men, those shops
Where I see you in the alleys like an offense
To the three pences jewelry, to the lingeries of nothing
Those shadows in the eyes of the women when you pass
All those noises all those chants and those passing perfumes
When you place yourself in it or when I exile you there
To love you from further away like that in passing
All those slightly crazy stuffs, all that is your style

Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Your style is my law when you bend to it, slut!
It's my blood to your wound, it's your fire to my cigarettes
It's love on the knees that never ends
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass

All those harbors of the night, that kid that we'd like to have
And then we don't want him anymore as soon as you beckon me
At the corner of a saying sticked in your wellness
By the blood of my set² and the wine of your vine
All this blending in memories of us
In those lost worlds of the year eighty thousand
When we'll not be there anymore and when we'll be reborn
All those slightly crazy stuffs, all that is your style

Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Your style is your right when I'm allowed to your style
It's that hellish game of head and then of tails
It's love that keeps quiet when you do not sing anymore
Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass

Wanting so much to know, one does not know anything no more
What I like about you it's what I imagine
At the tip of a gesture, at the rescue of my hand
At your mouth invented beyond indignity
In those streets of the night with my masked eyes
When you only recognizes a specific style of me
When I make of myself another one, imagined
All those careless things all that it's your style

Your style is your ass, it's your ass, it's your ass
Your style is your law when I bend to it, slut!
It's your wound, it's my blood, it's my ash at your cigarettes
When the night has thrown its fires and is dieing
Your style is your heart, it's your heart, it's your heart

²slang designating men's three pieces, usually used to ask to be left alone

Monique Morelli - Gaston Couté - Washday

Original Title: "Jour de lessive"
Text: Gaston Couté
His poems were first published in 1928 after his death.
Year: 1963

I left this very morning
Still drunk from the night but taken
of what's like an extreme digust
Spitting my farewell to Paris
And here I am, my good woman,
Yes, bust like four coins
My laundry is dirty so is my soul...
Here I am home!

My poor mother is on washday
Mother, Mother
Mother, your bad guy is coming
At the right time!...

Here is that linen on which dripped many
And many times a bitter wine,
Where bitches with painted lips
have wiped their mouth of hell
And here my soul, darker
Of the same blemishes - Alas!
Than the front of my shirt
Grey, pink and lilac...

My poor mother is on washday
Mother, Mother
Mother, your bad guy is coming
At the right time!...

At the bottom of the cuvier where we sow,
among the water, the ash from the oven,
Let all my bohemian linen
rest for a whole day...
And at last let my soul, alike
to that saddening display,
Among your soul - Oh good old woman!
Rest a moment...

My poor mother is on washday
Mother, Mother
Mother, your bad guy is coming
At the right time!...

Just like the linen confides
Its shame to the sweetnes of water
When I'll have recounted my life
Miserable of awful bastard,
Like one rinces in the fountain
The linen coming out of the cuvier
Mother, water my soul in sorrow
With a little mercy!

My poor mother is on washday
Mother, Mother
Mother, your bad guy is coming
At the right time!...

And when you will come to spread out
The linen parfumed of yellow flag
All white among the tender whiteness
Of the hedge where the month of May is blooming
I want to see my soul, still pure
In spite of its long sleep
In pain and filth,
Come back to life under the Sun!...

Gabriel Yacoub's version: