Bien moins jaloux de leur survivre

So yesterday was Bastille Day. I was driving home from the club and the local public radio station was playing a rousing version of La Marseillaise with a huge choir and an orchestra. It was long and I wondered if there were really that many choruses. I thought "I bet you can find the words on the WEB."

So this morning, when I was trying to sleep in but FFP and the dog kept waking me up for this and that, I got up, brewed a cuppa in the Capresso and found that about.com had the words. In French and in English. So I settled in for a pleasurable few minutes with my computer and my giant Harrap's French/English dictionary. I realized that I just don't know that much French. That, coupled with my difficulty understanding sung words in any language, has meant that for years I couldn't get past 'Allons enfants.' Which means "Let's go children." Those are the first words.

Before the last refrain there is a strange chorus that is a bit ghoulish. It is all about avenging or dying and it expresses an eagerness to join one's ancestors in death. "Bien moins jaloux de leur survivre." Much less eager to survive them. " Que de partager leur cercueil" Than to share their coffin. Hmm. What an interesting song. And even though I had the translation there I looked up a couple of words in the dictionary. And I remembered using my pocket translator to translate this word in 1989: cerceuil. I was in the hills of Provence near Mougins village in a country inn. I'd gone on a trip with some girlfriends. I'd gone to the village and gotten some papers. An earthquake had devastated the San Francisco area. The paper talked about the double decker freeway collapse in terms of "cerceuils de béton." Coffins of concrete.

Illness and death are on my mind. Who knew the French National Anthem was just going to reinforce it?

I tried to find a picture from Paris that I hadn't shown you. Well, this one was taken in the Musée d'Orsay. They have a giant cutaway of the old Paris opera house and this is a detail of it. I suppose it would have been more appropriate for a rumination about "The Phantom of the Opera." But, oh well.

I made another decision this morning. When we downsize and severely curtail the amount of stuff we are carting through life, I'm going to keep my gaint French/English dictionary. But a lot of stuff I'll just count on looking up on the WEB.