You Can’t Have the Blues In France

You can't sing the Blues in FrenchYou can’t have the Blues in France.  Not even if you’re blind.

You can’t have the Blues in France.  The language won’t let you. “Je reveillais ce matin” is French for “Woke up this morning”.  The accent falls on the wrong syllable.   None of the vowels sound right.   You have to hold your lips just so.

When Marcel Proust felt like a motherless child, he wrote In Search of Lost Time, which is about a million words too long. The French are too self-possessed to sing the Blues.  Occasionally a French person will run amok and commit an existential act of gratuitous violence.  Like in L’Etranger, by Camus.

Instead of the Blues the French have L’Existentialism,  which was invented by intellectuals.    The French think Intellectuals are sexy.  They also think older women are sexy.  No one expects the French to smile if they are not amused.

DSC_1346

This is where I took my early morning walk, through a 12th century village  so small it’s not on most maps. This was Vichy France. Before that it was Cathar Country, L’Occitane.

History repeats itself.  No one seems to learn from it. The veneer of civilization is thin.

 

 

 

This entry was posted in Blues, Existentialism, France and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to You Can’t Have the Blues In France

  1. merci buckets, as we say in franglais.

  2. lmorland says:

    I was intrigued by your title, as I am, at this moment, also in a medieval location in France — Narbonne. (It was never a village, but a city established by Julius Caesar; in fact, it was the capital of Occitania in its day… which has passed.)

    So, you have established that you can’t *sing* the blues in French. The question remains: do the French *feel* the blues?

    Many French are (famously) passionate about jazz, but I haven’t yet met a French person who has told me that he or she is “un fou des bleus”… which, of course, is the name of their national team.

Leave a comment