Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

ordinary hearts, women with huge arses, traitors, shaven-headed collaborationists, and older women. As I get older myself I increasingly treasure his line from “Saturne”— “Et la petite pisseuse d'en face / Peut bien aller se rhabiller” (“And the little brat opposite / Can go and put her clothes back on”). He was on the side of the solitary pyromaniac against the combined forces of the sapeurs pompiers; he saluted the man who had burgled his house (arguing that since the burglar got what he wanted, and he, Brassens, had derived a song from the incident, then the two of them were quits). He praised cats, pipes, male comradeship, and the artichoke-hearted woman who gives everyone a leaf. He execrated judges, gendarmes, right-thinking people, and the callously principled. Yet his tenderness could be robust, and enemies were not always forgiven. In the mid-Sixties, Brassens visibly lost weight, shrinking from an ursine presence towards comparative gauntness. Journalists informed their readers that the great singer had cancer. Their speculations were true; but though true, none the less intrusive. Brassens responded with “Le Bulletin de santé,” in which he admits that he has indeed left the ranks of the obese, but not for the reasons some impute. No— non, non, non, trois fois non —what has caused him to lose so much weight is not illness but the fact that he has spent a vast amount of time and energy fucking journalists' wives. Not the most delicate riposte, perhaps, but the provocation was hardly delicate either. And just to emphasize the aggressive corporeality of the matter, Brassens filches Mallarmé's line “Je suis hanté: l'Azur, l'Azur, l'Azur, l'Azur!” and depoeticizes it into “Je suis hanté: le rut, le rut, le rut, le rut!” (haunted not by a blue sky, but by sex).
    In “Le Mauvais sujet repenti,” one of his earliest songs (1953), Brassens takes on the voice of a pimp (or at least a semi-pro) to discuss the training-up of a débutante tart's sexual gift:
L'avait l'don, c'est vrai, j'en conviens,
L'avait le génie,
Mais, sans technique, un don n 'est rien
Qu'un' sal' manie …
    Without technique, a gift—even one amounting to genius— is no more than a filthy habit. * Despite—or perhaps because of—his restricted range of possible sound, Brassens throughout his career was constantly elaborating his technique, inventing, tautening, broadening: across three decades his ballads get grander, his melodies denser, his repeat-schemes more intricate.
    Thematically, his songs complicate too, as his understanding of the world complicates. In his early work, sex is a jolly and frequently satirical business, in which adultery is an act of cheerful revenge, escaped gorillas have their way with robed judges, and genial fetishists are obsessed with the bellybuttons of policemen's wives. In maturity, Brassens is more likely to hymn the Penelope who strays, the adulterer who can only perform if he really likes the husband he's cuckolding, and the poignant position (“Ma Maîtresse, La Traîtresse”) of the lover who feels betrayed when his mistress chooses to sleep with her husband. The singer is also quite happy to insult the Frenchman's self-image as a lover whose silky skills unfailingly provoke ecstasy: “Ninety-five per cent,” the song of that title maintains, is the percentage of women who are faking it. But then Brassens never pleased by seeking to please. Another statistic: in 1977 a survey found that 64.7 per cent of the nation would like to be in his skin because for them he represented The Happy Man. Asked to comment, he replied, “Ah, les cons …”
    The Collège Saint-Martin at Rennes was where I saw my first dead body: that of Père Roussel, a young priest who had succumbed in his twenties to some ungodly disease. He was laid out in a vestibule off the entrance hall to the main building, and boys were encouraged to visit him and pray for his soul. I drew the line at this, though I