Georges Brassens
Les passantes

This is a short story of ordinary days, of hands, pipes, and creased anthologies.

Let's start from the end. A record with a pink cover and rounded edges, featuring Fabrizio's face superimposed. It's 1974 when this so-called minor record with the unremarkable title Canzoni is released. Here, by singing Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Brassens, Fabrizio picked some of the best artichokes from his garden: right after an indigestible translation of Desolation Row by De Gregori, the listener is immensely fortunate to hear the bare voice of De André singing Le passanti. Attempting to describe what one feels at the first indelible listen of this song seems to be a doomed endeavor.

Almost a century earlier, on an ordinary day, in the far north of France, a mediocre poet named Antoine Pol was born in Douai. His rough hands, dusted in the trenches or blackened in the mines, always wrote words in line with the simplicity of an innocent expressive need.

At the end of the Second World War, in a ragged Paris, a young anarchist named Georges Brassens, between puffs from his pipe, read and reread a poem by Antoine Pol, with which he was obsessed. The poem, printed in a poetic anthology that the chansonnier had once found at the Porte de Vanves flea market, spoke with its simplicity about missed opportunities and the melancholy of every day. Brassens searched for years for its author to turn it into a song, but in vain.

Antoine, who in 1911 was twenty years old, gathered from the foam of days a tepid pearl, sparkling for a moment in the eyes of one and many unknown women, les passantes.

But finally and by chance, the phone rang for a now elderly singer-songwriter with gray mustaches. On the other end of the line was an intermediary for the now old poet. The two exchanged letters but never managed to meet. A letter, dated December 2, '70. The unknown Antoine died shortly after, before being able to listen, from Brassens's voice, to this simplest and vibrant song, bitter and filled with regrets like life.