United States or Trinidad and Tobago ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Even now I cannot hear "Nous n'irons plus an bois," or "Il pleut, il pleut, bergère" without my heart beating rather more quickly than is its wont. There can be no doubt that but for the fatal vice which held me fast, I should have been in love with Noémi two or three years later; but I was a slave to reasoning, and my whole time was devoted to religious dialectics.
Much of his verse especially his later verse is to me, at least, as obscure as Mallarme. But Il pleut dans mon coeur Comme il pleut dans la rue can never be surpassed for the fidelity with which it renders the endless drip, drip of melancholia, unless it is by that other magical lyric: Les sanglots longs Des violons De l'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langueur Monotone.
To his great surprise he could not detach himself from the causeuse. He then understood that he was the sport of a superior power. “Let us see,” he said to Roger. “What will you take to let me go? Do you wish me to prolong your life ten years?” “J’ai de bon tabac dans ma tabatière,” sang the great golfer. “Will you take twenty years?” “Il pleut, il pleut, bergère; Rentre tes blancs moutons.”
Mellicent, who took everything in deadly earnest, summoned up courage to give a mild little squeak of a reply. "Wee mais hier soir, il pleut;" and in the silence that followed Robert was visited with a mischievous inspiration. He had had French nursery governesses in his childhood, and had, moreover, spent two years abroad, so that French came as naturally to him as his own mother-tongue.
There is no doubt that he is a great artist. He assured me that there is no art like that of making people believe what you want them to. For instance, he pretends that he can sing "Il pleut, il pleut, bergere," and make you hear the patter of the bergere's heels on the wet sod, or wherever she was trying to rentrer ses blancs moutons.
Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him.
Thus they will not speak of reform, but of development; and they spoil their one honest and virile phrase, "the class war," by talking of it as no one in his wits can talk of a war, predicting its finish and final result as one calculates the coming of Christmas Day or the taxes. Now the same anarchic mystery that clings round the phrase, "il pleut," clings round the phrase, "il faut."
I won't pretend that they dwelt there, but look on it they once did the eyes of that great, sad, scandalous, religious French poet on a night of weary rain that set someone quoting, also in that street, "Il pleure dans mon coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville." Yes, and that French poet passed the gasometer on his way to New Zion. Actually. Romance!
He said it was utterly absurd and illogical, and though he ought to know it, as he had an English wife, he felt he never could learn it. "Apropos of to-day's weather, you say, 'It never rains but it pours' au fond qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? 'Il ne pleut jamais, mais il pleut a verse'; cela n'a pas le sens commun you might as well say, 'It never pours but it rains."
If he leans a little too much on this side he goes down into the mud, a little too much on the other he rolls in the dust. One must feel some respect for the man who undertakes such a thankless office. And, again, when a man rides in an open landau in pelting rain, when il lui pleut dans le nez, without an umbrella, with his hat off, saluting right and left, he deserves recognition."
Word Of The Day