Malady of Paris

His collected songs add up to a painful diagnosis of the chill of modern life, and in France that makes Leo Ferre a kind of poet laureate. He hates, among other things, the church, most governments, radio, television and the Academic Franchise, and he hates them with the droll expertise Frenchmen instinctively admire. In a country that nourishes the cult of the dinner-table anarchist, Ferre is almost a government in exile.

Ever since he began singing in the caves around St. Germain-des-Pres in the late '40s, Ferre has been the reigning voice of the "Defenders of French Song," a tight little school of contemporary troubadour-poets. He despises literary snobbery, and the lyrics of his 200 songs pulse with the rough and jeering argot of Parisian streets. Legionnaires listened to his records in the crumbling days of French Indo-China. They can still be heard in Hanoi, as well as in New York, Dakar or any place where hypochondriacs have no intention of curing themselves of that bittersweet nostalgia known as the Maladie de Paris. But his verses are also published in the prestigious Poetes d'Aujourd'hui series alongside Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Valery, and his music is among the best now being written for French song.

Tough Ideas. Ferre has such melodic facility that his songs can drift from one mode to another without the slightest misstep: a melody will slip into passages that suggest fado or flamenco or Orthodox church music, then emerge again for a major-key resolution. Ferre has written some lovely love songs, but most of his ideas are tough, and he does not mince words--as in Monsieur Tout-Blanc, his pre-Deputy attack on the Pope:

Simon Pure, If one fine morning you leave this world feet first For your castle in Paradise (perhaps it will be pretty) Pray for me. I don't have the time. I'll still be living in Aubervilliers With both my arms embracing misery.

Operation Madeleine. Ferre's songs evoke a complex feeling. Their mood is an absorbing compromise between optimism and disgust, and they have an ironic strength that makes their message as clear as a scream in the street. Though Ferre is a natural-born plaintiff, his songs never argue that life is absurd. "Despair," he says, "is a way of hiding things from one's self." Life is not pointless, just outrageously wrong.

Ferre became established as his own best interpreter only after he met his wife Madeleine in 1950. For years he had been down and out in Paris, playing and singing for $2 a night and composing on the side. "Operation Madeleine," as he calls the metamorphosis he undertook after his marriage, promptly rescued his career. He took off his glasses, got his teeth capped, cut his hair--and immediately found a whole new audience. Now at 47, he owns an island in Brittany, a house in the south of France, an apartment in Paris and an American car; his audience, he says, includes "everybody but the jerks--who are numerous."

Such new affluence confuses Ferre's old admirers, who still like to think of him as a flaming anarchist. But Ferre sees no point in living to please "les pro-fessionels de la miserabilite." His comfortable life in the country suits him perfectly, and it has done nothing to dilute the grave discontent that ignites his music. "This is a world where muzzles aren't made for dogs," he says. "One is supposed to be mediocre. It's the only chance of not bothering other people. But I'm a lucky villain, and I'm willing to tell even the truest of lies to defend my opinions."

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