IT'S RAINING IN PARIS

THOUGHTS ON LOVE, LEAVES AND THE LUXEMBOURG

       

  

  It’s raining in Paris. Not that this is news, since it’s been raining here, and across most of France, throughout the summer and now into Autumn.

          Coming from a country where rainfall veered between long parched months and weeks of tropical downpour, I loved Paris rain long before I moved here. Audrey Hepburn advises Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, “Be sure to have it rain for your first day in Paris,” and arriving in December I was well placed to take her advice.

           Those winter storms were a baptism, but I was ripe for conversion. The films of Carné and Renoir had already introduced me to the grey of the sky preceding a downpour, the sheen of wet cobbles, the shopgirls scampering for shelter, but it was thrilling to find that none had exaggerated.

             Nobody was more alert than me to the moment when the custodians of the Luxembourg gardens began raking up the chestnut leaves and corralling them in chicken-wire cages for incineration – always leaving, of course, enough for lovers to scuff through, hand and hand, as they had done for centuries. I’m not ashamed to say that I scuffed my share.

The elegant melancholy of the weather reinforced such films as Carné’s Les Portes de la Nuit, that dour tale of post-war revenge and hopeless love for which  Joseph Kosma wrote the wistful Feuilles Mortes/Dead Leaves. Jacques Prévert added the lyrics, performed here by the poster girl of the existentialists, Juliette Greco, "who sang poems by Sartre and Jacques Prévert," said a critic, "in an odd deep voice, infinitely stirring to those under twenty-five and touchingly immature to those over thirty.”  

        No good French tune goes untranslated into English, and Johnny Mercer did  the honours for Feuilles Mortes, retitled Autumn Leaves.

You may feel, as I do, that his self-pitying romanticism traduces the original; that the  tone should be closer to the despair of Paul Verlaine’s Autumn Song, “half in love with easeful death.”

The long sobs
Of the violins
Of autumn
Wound my heart
With monotonous
Languor.
          Verlaine was one of many disappointed lovers who looked to the Luxembourg to recapture something of earlier and happier days. Addicted to absinthe, dying at 51 from syphilis and diabetes, but belatedly acclaimed “Prince of Poets” by his peers, he reflected ironically “I have no palace - but this…” He indicated the Luxembourg – “is my royal park.”  Maybe, in the fallen leaves, he saw echoes of his lover and destroyer, the demonic young Rimbaud.

All choking
And pale
When the final hour sounds
I think back
To the days of yore
And I weep.

Me too.