1944, Cottbus prison

This song is set to a very old melody that has been used for contrafacta – or new lyrics added to an existing tune – since at least the early eighteenth century, as is clear from its inclusion in La clef des chansonniers (1717) by Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard, who was a music printer for many years under Louis XIV. This melody can be found, always with different lyrics, in many opera parodies presented at the Comédie-Italienne during the eighteenth century (for example, Louis Fuzelier”s Arlequin Persée in 1722; Claude Florimond Boizard de Pontau’s Arlequin Atys in 1726; and Les ensorcelés in 1757 by Justine Favart, Jean-Nicolas Guérin de Frémincourt and Harny de Guerville), as well as many other traditional folk songs such as Moi qui suis si jolie [I, Who Am So Pretty) and Vous chiffonnez mon bavolet [You’re Getting On My Nerves]. The original lyrics, as found in La clef des chansonniers, are about a shepherd who begs his beloved for a kiss while lamenting that “[his] pain comes only from being in love.” 

The lyrics are slightly modified in the score reproduced here, which is the only 1930s edition we could track down (as the vast majority of published versions of L’autre jour m’allant promener predate the nineteenth century). In this score, from a 1934 British collection, the addition of a second verse gives a voice to the shepherdess in question, introducing a sense of agency for a woman that is entirely absent both from the version notated by Ballard in 1717 and from the recording documented here.

This recording attests to the widespread oral mode of transmission of the song in France, well beyond the eighteenth century. Collected by Hubert Pernot for the Archives of the Spoken Word (an institute at the Sorbonne founded in 1911 by Ferdinand Bunot), it is performed by one of the Archives frequent collaborators, Suzanne Beaumont. The album’s centre label only mentions the title of the first song on the A side, hence the seeming discrepancy between the audio and the image that accompanies it. 

Described as a “little lament,” the transformed version by Oddon and her companions speaks to a refusal to work for the Nazis, a key stance for women of the Resistance. This theme takes on special significance within Cottbus prison, for as Oddon wrote in a talk given on June 28, 1945 at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, “when, in the fall of 1944, the SS set up a gas mask factory [there] […], the French and Belgian political prisoners refused to work in it and were sent to Ravensbrück.” In the song transcribed by Oddon before that ill-fated transfer, the original refrain “Oh, my pain comes only from being in love, And you hardly love me” is transformed and assigned to a prison guard pointing out the prisoners’ lack of cooperation: “Your lot is to work: you’re hardly working!”. The guard thus takes on the role of the shepherd, whose lament is no longer about a rebellious heart but about uncooperative prisoners. The second verse expresses anticipation of the long-awaited victory: “For however hard you’ve worked, He [Hitler] has lost the war…”.

[Sources: references 10, 15, 28, 29, 50, 53, 65, 86, 88, 117 in the bibliography]

Comparative transcription