30 Sep 2007
Silvester
Hugh, that was so mignon, though I don't know where the cowboy and the cactus came in to it! And yes, I read your post on JW so I see the relevance.  A propos of nothing, apart from the fact that it's also in French, here is a link to Francoise Hardy, to whom I listened beaucoup when I was in France this summer, showing my age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obn8FtSxbP4&mode=related&search=

30 Sep 2007
Hugh Fitzgerald

The link, alas, doesn't work. By cutting-and-pasting, the ether was filled not with the song I expected, but with "la maison où j'ai grandi."

Yes, it takes me back, back to endless tabloid  headlines about Johnny and Sylvie (http://johnny14.free.fr/jhsv1967.htm), and endless solemn discussions in Le Monde about l'enlèvement de Ben Barka, and the appearance of an amazing, fantastic, glassy and glossy, ultra-modern new place called Le Drugstore.

The song I wrongly assumed you might be putting up is one that I will now put up, as a separate Musical Interlude, so you can have your Hardy, and others can hear the favorite song of a sixteen-year-old jeune fille, the kind who has been bien rangée from her earliest years, and through her cartable-and-cahier period, right up to the period of melancholy adolescent longing to which Françoise Hardy's songs gave expression. And soon after, all bourgeois hell broke loose, or some thought it did. All that really happened was that one set of articles of faith were replaced by another. As a result of that new set of articles of faith, many French find themselves mentally and therefore physically unable to defend themselves and France from its greatest internal threat since the Nazis goosestepped under the Arc de Triomphe, eyes right. And now all kinds of things, including the dictée and Delacroix and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, are subject to permanent siege.