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Kent had watched the loading of them; now he saw them drifting lazily out from the shore, their long sweeps glinting in the sun, their crews singing wildly and fiercely their beloved Chanson des Voyageurs as their faces turned to the adventure of the North. In Kent's throat rose a thing which he tried to choke back, but which broke from his lips in a low cry, almost a sob.
It sounds like the old chanson my father used to sing;" and Louis, raising his voice, began to sing the words of an old French Canadian song, which we will give in the English as we heard it sung by an old lumberer. "Down by those banks where the pleasant waters flow, Through the wild woods we'll wander, and we'll chase the buffalo. And we'll chase the buffalo."
You will not find in the pages of Vauvenargues a distinct revival of that passion for the very soil of France, "la terre sainte, la douce France," which inspired the noble "Chanson de Roland" and has been so strongly accentuated in the recent struggle for Alsace-Lorraine.
Mademoiselle Cerise sang, with chic and abandon very fascinating to his own sensuous nature, a song with a charming air and sentiment. It was after a night at the opera when they had seen her in "Lucia," and the contrast, as she sang in his garden, softly lighted, showed her at the most attractive angles. She drifted from a sparkling chanson to the delicate pathos of a song of De Musset's.
My own reading varied from "Quentin Durward" and Gibbon to the "Chanson de Roland." Miller took out his little pet owl Moses, from the basket in which Moses dwelt, and gave him food and water. Moses crooned and chuckled gratefully when he was stroked and tickled. Late the first evening we moored to the bank by a little fazenda of the poorer type. The houses were of palm-leaves.
His earlier compositions, the quintet, the orchestral "Les Vieillées de l'Ukraine" and "La bonne chanson," for instance, are distinctly derivative and uncharacteristic in style. The idiom is derived in part from Fauré, in part from Wagner and other of the romanticists.
He was sitting in a window of the Manor, just after he had come from Montreal, playing a violin which had once belonged to De Casson, the famous priest whose athletic power and sweet spirit endeared him to New France. His fresh cheek was bent to the brown, delicate wood, and he was playing to his sister the air of the undying chanson, "Je vais mourir pour ma belle reine."
I don't like to say it, he continued, but poets commonly have no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect. The more stops, the better. Do let them all be pulled out in their turn! So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest songs, and after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams.
And now, heralded by a convulsive flourish from the President's bugle, a young Chicard, whose dilapidated outer man sufficiently contradicted the burthen of his song, shouted with better will than skill, a chanson of Beranger's, every verse of which ended with: "J'ai cinquante écus, J'ai cinquante écus, J'ai cinquante écus de rente!"
I am reading Juste Olivier's "Chansons du Soir" over again, and all the melancholy of the poet seems to pass into my veins. It is the revelation of a complete existence, and of a whole world of melancholy reverie. How much character there is in "Musette," the "Chanson de l'Alouette," the "Chant du Retour," and the "Gaite," and how much freshness in "Lina," and "A ma fille!"
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