Bad Reputation

Impasse Florimond in the years after WWII.

The song goes by in 3 minutes and 9 seconds but feels much faster. Imagine that this was your first time hearing the singer or song, it seems impossible to conceptualize the piece as any kind of protest. You’re racing to catch up with the lyrics, the gentle boum ba boum of the guitar leading you along in an insistant rhythm that resembles a man pacing or in a hurry to get somewhere. He’s talking quickly and quietly in plainsong, a stranger passing on a street. The whole thing is lighter than air, and barely underway, is over. With that bouncy rhythm, it’s easy to regard the thing as a French trifle, hard to take seriously, maybe a song about love gone wrong. Another one of those things that doesn’t translate. Is it a poem ? A statement ? Are you both spies headed to a clandestine meeting and he’s whispering the code ? All of the above.

In this town i don’t have to work hard / For my bad reputation. / Whether I’m slaving away or keeping to myself / Everyone thinks I’m a know-it-all. / I don’t do anyone any harm / I go my way, a good natured guy. // But Good People don’t like it / When someone takes a different road

All of which, if this were America, seems a set-up for a High Noon shoot out on Main Street between a Cool Guy and the Straights, a real orgy of cosplaying hipsterism. Except that everything in the rhythm, the intonation of the voice, the whole ambiance of the song says no to that. The singer even manages to get in a few jokes. Everyone points the finger at me, he says, except the ones who don’t have arms. Everyone gives me a kick, except the guys who lost their legs. (And where might they have lost their arms or legs ?) A little corny — that’s how it is in small towns — but the singer saves the most revealing bit for last :

No need to be a Jeremiah / To know what’s in store for me / If they found a rope that fits / They’d put it around my neck / Even if I don’t harm a single soul / By taking roads that don’t lead to Rome // But the good people don’t care for those / Who take another route / Everyone round here would come to see me hang / Except the blind, I’m sure you understand !

Nowhere do we get the sense the singer is clearing out, that he’s headed to the bus station with his bags packed. It’s part of the seductive anarchy of the song that he appears to be staying where he is, under people’s noses. Everybody lives in a small town of some kind. Could be twenty thousand or five, a neighborhood in a city or a village nestled in the hills with all of 235 inhabitants. You can’t really move away.

(Ten years or so later another chansonnier was in a similar mood : ‘If my thought dreams could be seen / They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.’ Is that last word merely a good rhyme or a tip of the hat ?)

It’s worthwhile to remember that the song was written in the years immediately after the Second World War, when social conformity was at its height. People had a lot of reasons to be on the right side of things back then, just like they do now.

The stranger who wrote the song was born in the southern town of Sète, a small pile of rock topped with pine and cypress trees, laced with Mediterranean beaches on three sides. The singer didn’t take the well-travelled road to Rome but came by way of the Basdorf camp near Berlin, where he was doing forced labor — a one way ticket to physical exhaustion and death. A year into it, given a day off, he promptly disappeared, turning up in occupied Paris, where he stayed with his aunt Antoinette. That couldn’t last. He was a deserter, and, in the waning days of ’44, would be shot if recognized. (With the same in store for her.) Looking for a place to hide he found an narrow little alley in the 14th, quartier Plaisance, where an older couple, Jeanne and Marcel Planche, took him in, giving him the cot in the corner of a house with no electricity, gas or interior plumbing, where the dogs, cats, a turtle, a buzzard and a lonely mother duck outnumbered the humans.

The alley is Impasse Florimond or Florimont (the signs disagree), bringing to mind florilège, a medley or florifère, abounding in flowers. None of that. It was named after a certain Monsieur Flowery World or Flowery Hill. Back in the days of summary justice, Florimond was the local church executioner who strung his victims up along the road running to Vanves and Montrouge. That practice lasted until Louis XIV took that privilege for himself. None of which, we can guess, the stranger knew or much cared about while he lived there, forming a lasting attachment to the place, the people and the brutes, making it his hide-out for the next twenty years. Toss another unintentional irony onto the pile for the guy who picked up a banjo and started to write Bad Reputation.

In 1952, during a party at the home of the Parisian singer Patachou, Georges Brassens, 31 years old, made his debut with the song Mauvaise Reputation. The frequent opener at concerts throughout his career, it became the title of his first album and, in his words, his credo as an artist. The song was given top honors on the airwaves — it was immediately banned, much like Vian’s Deserteur a few years later. As is usually the case, censorship had the reverse effect.

(Stretching credulity just a little, Pierre Nicholas, who met Brassens that night chez Patachou and became his bass player for the next thirty years, was born on Impasse Florimond before the war.)

Georges Brassens, undated press photo.

Further down the road, the Academie Française gave Georges Brassens the Grand Prize for Poetry in 1967. That’s some journey from the Impasse. While recording 200 hundred songs of his own, he also set poets like Victor Hugo, Paul Fort, Louis Aragon, Verlaine, Jean Richepin, Alfred Musset, Villon and half a dozen others to music. The Impasse is cleaned up now but it’s hard to find, hidden to the side of a gas station off rue d’Alesia. There’s a plaque for Brassens, and one for Nicholas, too. Brassens’ reads, Et que j’emporte entre les dents un flocon des neiges d’antan. May I carry one of yesterday’s snowflakes between my teeth. A line from one of his songs, and a nod to Villon.

Those are a few of the things that went into that one song, a tune that sounds easy, off the cuff. You can read more about it, it’s all out there. Of the three men most responsible for the early renaissance, or maybe reimagination, of French chanson after World War Two — Brassens, Jacques Brel, Leo Ferré — Brassens may be the one whose music travels least. It’s too homey, straight, never over the top, never calling attention to itself. In any case, passing over a life’s work that many French, those tempramental (if not actual) anarchists, know by heart, let’s race to the end, when Brassens was thinking about his old home town. His poem, Supplique pour être enterré dans la plage de Sète. Request To Be Buried On The Beach At Sète gives the Grim Reaper a good run for his money, gently mocking the petits catastrophes of humankind (of which death is the coup de grâce), telling little stories about shipwrecks and sea maidens, crowded sepultures, dolphins, his first romance on the beach. Where the language of Bad Reputation is spare, Sète is extravagant.

Brassens was seriously ill and sweating profusely when he made his last tour of France. Supplique was one of the standouts — talk about graveside humor. I offer it here in an unrhymed version that only tries to catch some of the images and feeling. I’m sure you can find better but I did this one quickly, just to get it down. There are links at the end of this piece for all of it. Paul Valery, a poet from the other end of the spectrum from Brassens, is also buried in Sète.

The Grim Reaper’s had it in for me

Ever since I stuck flowers up his nose.

He tails me like an obsessive dope.

With funerals everywhere I turn

It’s time to think about revising my last words

and paying for a few riders to my will.

Dip your pen in the blue ink of the sea

in the Gulf of Leon, my dear old notary

And with an elegant flourish

Take note of what I’ve planned for my remains

when soul and body no longer agree

on anything except it’s time to go their separate ways.

When my soul has taken flight to the horizon

To join Gavroche and Mimi Pinson,

the street urchins and working girls,

May my body travel to native ground

in the sleeping car “Paris-Mediterranée”,

Last stop Sète, end of the line.

The family vault, alas, is nothing new.

To put it crudely, it’s as stuffed as a deviled egg

In that place no one ever leaves.

It’s getting late so I can’t ask

those brave folks, Shove over if you please!

Make room for the young, so to speak.

At the edge of the sea, two steps from the blue waves

Dig, if it’s allowed, a soft hole,

a cozy little niche

Close to the dolphins, my childhood mates,

The whole length of the strand where the sand is smooth.

You know the place, la Corniche.

A beach where, even when he throws a fit

Neptune’s only kidding

And when a boat runs aground

The captain cries, ‘I’m the boss on board !

Save yourself if you can but the wine and pastis go first !

Grab your flask and good luck !’

It’s there, once upon a time, that fifteen years flew by.

At the age when playing alone lost its allure,

I fell in love for the first time.

Sitting next to a sirene, a woman-fish

My initiation in love

ended when I swallowed my first bone.

With guarded deference to Paul Valery

A master this humble troubadour can’t hope to outdo -

May he pardon me.

And yet, if his verses are worth more than mine

The hometown crowd will have a better time

At my grave close to the waves

A tomb sandwiched ‘twixt sea and sky

won’t throw a gloomy shade across the scene

but a charm that has no name.

Let bathers use it as a screen

to change their suits, and happy kids yell,

“ Cool! We’ve found a castle made of sand.”

Is this too much to ask ? On my tiny patch of ground

Plant, if you don’t mind, a species of pine,

The umbrella pine would be my choice

that offers shade against the sun

For good friends who visit

to pay loving, last respects.

Some from Spain, some from Italy

reeking of perfume and festive airs

The mistral and the tramontane

Pouring echoes over my last snooze

one day a villanelle and a fandango, the next

A tarantelle and a sardane.

And when she uses my heap to rest her head

An ondine from the sea drifts off to sleep

wearing a little less than nothing at all

I beg Jesus’s pardon in advance

If the shadow of my cross falls across her face

for a little happiness after my fall.

Poor kings and pharoahs too! Poor Napoleon!

Poor great ones in the Pantheon!

Poor ashes of the great

You’ll feel a bit of envy for the eternal guest

Who pedals the waves in his dreams,

For whom death is but a summer break.

(Georges Brassens, October 1921 — October 1981)

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“Anti-conformista por adentro, no por afuera.” So says Paco Ibañez before his lovely, singalong version of Mala Reputación in Spanish. He calls Brassens the Johann Sebastian Bach of the chanson. You can find Mauvaise Reputation here and Enterré à Sète here. Take a look around for Brassens’ settings of the French poets. I’m indebted to Titi for some of the photos here. You can visit her Brassens pages here

Originally published at https://continentalriffs.substack.com.