Dear friend,

“La musique,” protested Georges Brassens, “je n’en ai pas le génie!”
“Music…that is not my talent!”

We were listening to an old radio interview on France Culture while drinking tea on the perron, enjoying the golden afternoon sunshine filtering through the red leaves of the beech tree.

Across the radio waves, the interviewer laughed indulgently. In 1979, when the entretien took place, Brassens was one of the greatest songwriters of post-war France. His biggest hit, Les Copains d’abord, is still appearing in new permutations. It was an éléctro danse hit in 2016 and there’s an indie reprise out this year.

Brassens insisted. “Moi, c’est les paroles.” “I just write words.”

His genius, he said, was to find the right note, the right rhythm, the perfect tempo to set his words down, like birds perched on a rocking wave.

The interviewer reflected that the Académie française had awarded Georges Brassens the Grand Prix de Poésie back in 1967. Brassens demurred.

“Un poète, ça vole quand même un peu plus haut que moi… Je ne suis pas poète.”

“A poet, that flies a little higher than me!...I am not a poet.”

Words set to music. A song. Neither purely the art of music nor of poetry, but something less precise and more elemental than either alone.

Perhaps a song is like a marriage. The “I do” that unites two beings into one.

Music followed us all through that October afternoon three weeks earlier, Viola’s wedding day. Or perhaps it was we who followed the music.

We were sentimental, solemn, awestruck to the strains of Massenet’s “Méditation pour Thaïs.” We brimmed with tender joy as the happy couple swayed to the tune of “At Last,” twirling and dipping under the great garland of roses suspended from the tent. And we were ready to fling roses wildly with the throng to the beat of “Felicità,” that venerable tube from the summer of 1982. The wedding party had lept to its collective feet and taken to the dance floor.

Music may transcend thought and speak directly to our hearts. But words cast the wedding spell. The liturgy frames the sacrament that transforms two single people into man and wife.

And like a song, the music wound into the language of the liturgy gives it magical power.

“Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame,” read our Henry during the ceremony, from the Song of Songs. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”

The majestic call and response of the 148th Psalm, read by Viola’s oldest brother and her new sister-in-law, resonated like the chords of a pipe organ:

“Praise the Lord upon the Earth, ye dragons and all deeps; fire and hail, snow and vapours, wind and storm…he hath given them a law which shall not be broken.”

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three;
but the greatest of these is charity,” read le petit Edouard, the youngest and second tallest of our children, his voice carrying the grave sonority of Saint Paul’s words about love out from the improvised altar and up to the trees arching over the assembled company.

The trees on this autumn afternoon have begun to shed their leaves, a soft damp breeze blowing them across the coarse grass of the Great Lawn.

Tomorrow, the young couple return from their lune de miel. Life will resume, to another rhythm and another music, their danse à deux.

The interview with Brassens was drawing to a close. The last trickle of tea from the pot was cold.

The interviewer observed that the great songwriter had never married.

“L'encre des billets doux pâlit
Vite entre les feuillets des
livres de cuisine,” said Brassens, quoting his song, La Non-Demande en marriage. He wrote it for his great love, Joha, who lies buried beside his grave.

“The ink of a love letter soon grows pale between the pages of a cookbook.”

Nevertheless, though Brassens never wanted to share the kitchen sink with his beloved and though he was an ardent atheist, he seems to have understood the message of the Song of Songs:

Monseigneur l'astre solaire
Comme je ne l'admire pas beaucoup
M'enlève son feu, oui mais, d'son feu, moi j'm'en fous
J'ai rendez-vous avec vous
La lumière que je préfère
C'est celle de vos yeux jaloux
Tout le restant m'indiffère
J'ai rendez-vous avec vous!

My lord the sun
As I care not for him
May deprive me of his light, yes but I don’t care about his light;
I have a rendezvous with you!
The light that I prefer
Beams from your eyes
Nothing else matters.
I have a rendezvous with you!

Here’s to love songs and the song of love!