Charles Aznavour - Paris during the month of August

Original Title: "Paris au mois d'août"
Music: Georges Garvarentz
Year: 1966
Song written by Aznavour for the movie "Paris au mois d'août", inspired from the book written by René Fallet.
An english adaptation exists, written also by Aznavour in 1967.

Swept away by September
Our love of one summer
Sadly dismembers itself
And dies in the past
No matter how I expected it
My heart emptied of everything
Looks suspiciously like
Paris during the month of August

Of tears and laughter
Our love was made
Which dreading the worse
Lived day by day
Every street, every stone
Seemed to belong only to us
We were alone on earth
In Paris during the month of August

To tell you I love you
As far away as you are
A part of myself
Stays attached to you
And the other part, solitary
Looks from everywhere
For the blinding light
Of Paris during the month of August

God make that my dream
To find back some
Of the month of August on your lips
Of Paris in your eyes
Shapes up and revives
Our slightly crazy love
So that everything begins again
In Paris during the month of August

Georges Brassens - The non marriage proposal

Original title: "La non demande en mariage"
Year: 1966

My love, I beg you, let's not place
Under Cupidon's throat
his own arrow
So many lovers have tried it
Who, with their happiness, have paid
That sacrilege...

I have the honour of not asking for your hand
Let's not engrave our names at the bottom of a parchment

Let's leave the field clear for the bird
We'll both be prisonners on parole
To hell with the mistresses chef
Who attach the hearts at the handle
Of the pans!

I have the honour of not asking for your hand
Let's not engrave our names at the bottom of a parchment

Venus is getting old, often
She is losing her latin in front of
The roastingpan
For no price, me, would I want to
Pluck the leaves off
The daisy

I have the honour of not asking for your hand
Let's not engrave our names at the bottom of a parchment

It may seem easy
To put away, at the bottom of a jar
filled with jam
The pretty forbidden fruit
But it's cooked, it has lost
its natural taste

I have the honour of not asking for your hand
Let's not engrave our names at the bottom of a parchment

One takes off quite a few charms
While unveiling too much the secrets
Of Mélusine
The ink of the sweet notes grow pale
Quickly between the pages
of the cookbooks

I have the honour of not asking for your hand
Let's not engrave our names at the bottom of a parchment

I have no need of an handmaid
And of the housekeeping and its care
I excuse you
As an enternal bride
As the lady of my thoughts
Always I think about

I have the honour of not asking for your hand
Let's not engrave our names at the bottom of a parchment

Jean Ferrat - Song for you

Original Title: "Chanson pour toi"
Text: Michelle Senlis
Year: 1966

When dawn thinks it's Matisse
When butterflies lose their pleats
Like to the flower of the pomegranate tree

When the first fragile sun
Hits on the closed shutters of the city
One by one to wake them up

When the first horse who trots
Has smoke under the boots
Some soil under the shoes

I open my eyes and I see you
I open my eyes and I believe you
I open my eyes and it's for you
That I want to live, my love

When noon thinks it's Cézanne
That it puts wind in the plane trees
And some blue in the olive trees

When all the herds take fright
That heat takes them, lays them down
Under the thin shadow of a fig tree

When all the streets are deserted
That none offers a green square
A shelter, a shadow, a path

I open my eyes and I see you
I open my eyes and I believe you
I open my eyes and it's for you
That I want to live, my love

When the evening turns its cliffs blue
Like a Japanese print
Like a Renoir, like a Manet

When the drunk sun capsizes
In the ocean and stretches out
Like an unfolded fan

When everything is metamorphosed
And that only the scent of the roses
Keeps exacerbating

I open my eyes and I see you
I open my eyes, I stretch out my arms
I open my eyes and it's for you
That I want to live, my love

My love

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - The crazy woman

Original Title: "La folle"
Text: Louis Aragon
Music: L. Leonardi

Year: 1966

Have a look at this crazy woman and her ankle shoes
She has all the streams in her enamel eyes
She has all the birds on her straw hat
And her handbag her dreams of when she was twenty years old

Have a look at this waste of tulle and anemone
That dusty dream like an old ashtray
It's yesterday's sheet on the calendar
The faded refrain of an autumn song

Have a look at this smile and that flutter
Almost nothing would be enough for us to start believing them
Would it be for the deep cruelty of the mirrors
And that faded reflection which looks like a renunciation

It's my life, I well have to recognize her
It's my life, and it's me, that distorted song
One fine evening the future is called the past
It's then that we turn and see our youth...

What more were you expecting, which fate, which adventure
Which glory for you only or which stolen happiness
What else are you in the end but what the wheat is to the millstone
What the ash is to the fire, the body to the torture...

I don't see really what grieves you here
Or gives you the right to shout in the night
Your destiny resembles you and your shadow follows you
The crazy ones are those who think themselves others

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - An October tune

Original Title: "Un air d'Octobre"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1966

A tune like a vast train
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may
A tune that always starts again

Your eyes have the horizon sickness
Crazy the one who finds azure blue enough
To whom the sky isn't a prison
One has to love with immoderation
Reason is not enough

Beautiful autumn with velvet hands
It's the song that is never sung
It's the song of our love
It's the song of the tea-roses
Which heart have the color of the day

A tune like a vast train
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may
A tune that always starts again

Is there a deep enough sob
To tell the physical deserts
Alike to the circles one makes in the water
Are the words matching the music
Of the long desire in the heart enclosed

A tune, Elsa, of dementia
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may is
A tune like a vast train

A tune like a vast train
A tune which never ends
An October tune, a romance
Softer than the month of may
A tune that always starts again

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - Paris 42

Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1966

A song that speaks of an incurable ill
Sadder than the plaza of Italy at midnight
Alike to Point-du-Jour for the melancholy
More dreams at the fingers than the sandman
Announcing pleasure like a merchant of oblivion

A vulgar and sweet song where the voice lowers
Like a one night love doubting of the following day
A song that takes women by the hand
A song that is being said under the Barbès metro station
And that changes at Etoile and goes down at Jasmin²

It's Paris that shadow theater that I carry
My Paris that couldn't completely be taken away from me
Not more than one could take to lips their shout
What had been required to threw me out of it
Tear me the heart and you will see Paris in it.

It's of that Paris that I made my poems
My words are of the weird colour of those roofs
The throat of the pigeons are cooing and glistening there
I have written more of you Paris than of myself
And more than of growing old suffered to be without you

Who hasn't seen the day rising up on the Seine
Ignores what is that heartbreak
When caught in the act the night fails itself
Defends itself, comes undone the red eyes obscene
And Notre-Dame comes out of the waters like a magnet

The aorta of the Pont Neuf shivers like an orchestra
Where I hear beginning the wine of my twenties
There blows here a wind that comes from the times of yesteryear
To die in the hair of the equestrian statue
The city like an heart opens itself double-doors.

The wind will whisper my verses to the waste grounds
It will brush against the benches where no one sat
We will hear it cry on the quays of Passy
And the bridges repeating the promise of the rings
will go away engaged to the following rhymes

Paris wakes up and I to find those myths back
That were burning our blood in our obscurity
I will put in my hands my irritated face
Let the song be reborn that the birds imitate
And which answers Paris when one says liberty

² Parisian metro stations

Jacques Marchais' version:

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Louis Aragon - To laugh and to cry

Original Title: "Rire et Pleurer"
Text: Louis Aragon
Music: Lino Léonardi
Year: 1966

Man hesitates between crying
And laughing, and laughing carelessly.
His dreams are sometimes going so fast
That he doesn't know himself how
It's that crying leaves him

As long as one plays dice
everything depends on the dots you bring up
This out of tune instrument
Which we take for the human soul
Is only useful to change our mind

Cruel and pitiful world
That believes everything it is being told
And carries its unbelievable cross
Through plague and fire
While making fun of the poor devils

My heart, my heart watch out for people
Even to those who shiver from cold
They only have memory of money
Don't know they look like us
And even make some while sharing

Afterall it's barely if they notice
If it's sunny or if it's raining
Those are animals that you pen in
Under the black sky or the blue sky
While waiting for them to be taken away

For which penal colony, for which destiny
For which night that has no limit
For which night that has no morning
Which night where dying imitates
The first childlike gestures

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Aragon - Elsa's hands

Original Title: "Les Mains d'Elsa"
Text: Louis Aragon (1963)
Year: 1966

Give me your hands for the anxiety
Give me your hands of which I've dreamt so much
Of which I've dreamt so much in my loneliness
Give me your hands so that I'm saved.

When I take them at my own trap
of palm and fear, of haste and emotion
When I take them like a water of snow
that melts from everywhere in my own hands

Will you ever know what goes through me,
What overwhelms me and what invades me
Will you ever know what pierces me,
What I betrayed when I flinched

What the deep language says that way
That mute way of speaking of animal senses
Without mouth and without eyes, mirror without image
That simmer of loving that has no words

Will you ever know what the fingers think
of a prey held a moment between them.
Will you ever know what their silence,
a flash, would have known of unknown

Give me your hands for my heart to form there
for the world to go quiet there at least a moment
Give me your hands for my soul to sleep there
For my soul to sleep there eternally.

Marc Ogeret's version:

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Monique Morelli - Aragon - We play the man

Original Title: "On fait l'homme"
Year: 1966

We think ourselves free when we only imitate. We play the man
We want in this huge and insipid antics
to read we do not know which pointless adventure
when simply all the ways lead to Rome
When each of our steps is writen beforehand

Look at the young people and what they drag along
The superstition clinging to their steps
like a dead branch and like to the bottom
of a dismasted boat, the song of the siren
against what nothing helps not even compass

Look at those young people. What pushes them
like that toward the sandbanks, the shallows?
They had after all nothing new but the sweet little face
Them who were swaggering earlier. They all go
where the childhood dreams fall apart in the end

God, look at yourselves, small ones, in the mirrors
You have the hair messy and the eye lost
You are ready to do everything: obey, kill, believe
People like you the century has its drawers full of
You are sold up by the bucketful and it's very well sold

You are the odd-job flesh; A sort of
common material, a low-cost brick
With you no need to pull one's punches
You are this food that the crows take away
And your dreams, the wolves make short work of them

All poems written by Louis Aragon

Barbara - My most beautiful love story

Original Title: "Ma plus belle histoire d'amour"
Year: 1966

As far as it is returning to me
the shadow of my old loves
As far as the first date

At the time of my first sorrows
I was barely fifteen years old then
White heart, scratches on the knees

That it was - I was precocious -
tender child's love
or the bites of a mad love

As far as I can remember
If I have said "I love you" since then
My most beautiful love story is you

It's true I didn't behave
And I turned many pages
Without reading them, white, and then nothing on them

It's true, I didn't behave
And my warriors of passage
Barely seen, already gone

But through their faces
it was already your image
It was you already and baren heart

I was packing my luggages again
and pursuing my mirage
My most beautiful love story is you

On the long road, leading up to you
On the long road, I was going with a crazy heart
December's wind was freezing at my neck
No matter December if it was for you

How long the road was
but I walked it, the road
The one leading up to you

And I'm not a perjurer
if this evening I swear to you
that for you I'd have done it on my knees

There would have required way more
than just some bad apostles
than winter or snow in my neck

For me to lose patience
And I calmed my violence
My most beautiful love story is you

But so many winters and falls
Nights, days and noone
You were never at the rendez-vous

And of you, becoming discouraged
Suddenly the rage grabbed me
My god, how much I needed you

To the hell with you
Others opened me their doors
Happy, I went far away from you

Yes I've been unfaithful to you
But I was coming back to you anyway
My most beautiful love story is you

I've cried tears
but how sweet it was to me, oh so sweet
that first smile from you

And for a tear, coming from you
I cried of love
Do you remember?

It was an evening in september,
you came to wait for me
Here exactly, do you remember it?

Looking at you smiling
Loving you without saying anything
It's at that moment that I suddenly understood

I had reached the end of my journey
And I put my luggages down
You were there at the rendez-vous

No matter what can be said about it
I wanted to tell you
Tonight I thank you for yourself

No matter what can be said about it
I came to tell you
My most beautiful love story is you

Live version:

Studio version:

Jacques Bertin - Louis Aragon - Now that the youth

Original Title: "Maintenant que la jeunesse"
Text: Louis Aragon
Music: L. Leonardi
Year: 1966 (Morelli's version), 1982 (Bertin's version)

Now that the youth
goes out on the blue windows
Now that the youth
Unconscious, betrayed me

Now that the youth
You remember, remember it
Now that the youth
Sings the spring to others
Now that the youth
Turns away its lilac eyes

Now that the youth
Is not here or there anymore
Now that the youth
On other light paths

Now that the youth
Follows a foreign cloud
Now that the youth
Ran away, generous thief
Leaving me my right of primogeniture
And the silver of my hair.

It's a fine day as to not believe in it
It's a fine day like never
What a weather, what a weather witout memory
One does not know how to see anymore
nor to get up nor to sit down
It's a fine day like never

It's an unnatural weather
Like the sky in paintings
Like the oblivion of tortures
It's a fine day like never

Fresh, like water under the row
A weather strong like a woman
A weather to damn one's soul
It's a fine day like never

A weather to laugh and run
A weather to not die
A weather to fear for the worst
It's a fine day like never

Monique Morelli's version:

Marc Ogeret's version:

Hélène Martin's version:

Les Compagnons de la chanson's version:



All poems written by Louis Aragon

Hélène Martin - Louis Aragon - The Fire

Original Title: "Le feu"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1966

My God, my God, it doesn't die out
All my forest, I'm here burning
I mistook this fire for dusk
I believed my heart to be at its last step

I was always waiting for the day to become ash
I read getting old where wicker breaks
I watched out for the moment after the blaze
I listened to the song of ashes, going down

I was of the knife, of the age throat cut
I brought my fingers where living bleeds me
Measuring this way the end of my rule
The little I've left and the nothing I have

But as pain ought to end
Sometimes I took my contentment from it
Betting on the shadow and the moment
Where the door opening, tears the dream.

But as much as I want to be done with it,
Look in this body for the alarm and alert
The absence and the night, the abyss and the loss
of which I bear in me the deep denial

There is a wind rising there that is something of a miracle
The approach of you making me spring
I've never had in my life so much
even in your arms, today vertigo

The pain of loving perpetuates the flame
In me the fire deploys its devastations
To nothing served, nor time, nor age
My soul, my soul, where are you taking me?
Where are you taking me?

All poems written by Louis Aragon