Leonard Cohen & Serge Gainsbourg: Song Comparison – Part 2

‘Take this Longing’ and ‘L’Eau à la bouche’ are both songs of frustrated desire, but in very different registers. Serge’s song has the light-hearted ease befitting the film for which it was written. It is very much a song in which the ego is master in its own house: the man is not alienated in his desire, the woman is not neurotic in her resistance; each knows their role in a familiar game. There is no doubt that the man, in the end, will get the woman into his bed; there is no doubt that the satisfaction he seeks will be a simple pleasure, like a warm coat in winter or a hearty meal with good wine. Exquisitely wrought, both musically and lyrically, the song is transparent. It makes no demands on the listener, it revels in its status as ‘art mineur’. Art tout court, however, is never transparent: something in it always escapes capture. Indeed, despite the utter charm of the song, it cannot engage us ‘in that place we cannot master’, that place where the ego is not master in its own house: that place where art takes place. Leonard’s song, in contrast, is situated entirely in that place. There, desire alienates; sex, no longer a mirror game, becomes erotic, an encounter with alterity. The self is not secure, the other is not obvious, and the more intimate the man and woman become with this unfamiliarity, the more occasion they have to ‘become who they are’. Walk on by if you want a warm coat and a hearty meal: here, sex is a trip into transgression. Now, if ‘Take this Longing’ is such an excellent song, it is largely because its metaphors are at once highly enigmatic and highly suggestive, and because the longing it speaks of throws one, as it does the singer, back upon oneself. Being spurned forces one to interrogate one’s desire, and that experience holds out the possibility, like the searchlight in Leonard’s song, of some revelation.

Cohen and his commentators¹ have pointed out that the impetus for ‘Take this Longing’ came from the poet’s frustrated desire for Nico. Leonard:

I walked into a club called the Dom and I saw someone singing there who looked like she inhabited a Nazi poster. It was Nico, the perfect Aryan ice queen. I just stood there and said forget the new society, this is the woman I’ve been looking for. I followed her all round New York. Nico eventually told me ‘Look, I like young boys. You’re just too old for me.’²

How might this fact help us interpret the lyrics of the song? I will argue that Nico is important here only to the extent that she reveals something of Leonard to himself. Jean Baudrillard:

What seduces you in the other is that the other is the site of your secret. Not the site of your likeness and certainly not of your truth—neither the hidden ideal-type of who you are nor the hidden ideal of what you lack but rather the site of what escapes you, through which you escape yourself, and escape from your own truth. A site of vertigo, not desire but vertigo, a site of neither alienation nor annihilation, but of eclipse, of appearance / disappearance, of a scintillation of being. That is at once your secret and the secret of seduction: a game of absence / presence, a duel around the centre of absence.³

From this perspective, then, Nico is the site of Leonard’s secret.

1 – See, for example, Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (London: Vintage, 2012/2016) p. 154 and Christophe Lebold, Leonard Cohen: L’Homme qui voyait tomber les anges (Rosières-en-Haye, France: Camion Blanc, 2013) Kindle edition.

2 – Quoted in Jim Devlin, ed., Leonard Cohen in His Own Words (UK: Omnibus Press, 1998) p. 84

3 – Jean Baudrillard, ‘Les abîmes superficiels’ in Maurice Olender & Jacques Sojcher, La Séduction (Paris: Éditions Aubier Montaigne / Colloques de Bruxelles, 1980) pp. 202-03. Translated here by Richard Jonathan

‘What seduces you in the other is that the other is the site of your secret’: It is interesting to note the similarities between the two most significant women—Marianne and Nico—who were ‘the site of Leonard’s secret’ during the 1960s. In ‘Winter Lady’, Marianne is the ‘child of snow’ whose hair when she was sleeping¹ she’d weave ‘on a loom / Of smoke and gold and breathing’. Marianne ‘used to wear her hair like you’, Leonard tells Nico, ‘except when she was sleeping’. Other similarities: Both Marianne and Nico, as Christophe Lebold points out,² were women who lived with a young son whom the father had abandoned. And each was an ‘Aryan’ beauty, with Marianne, in her care for Leonard, an angel of life and Nico, with her childhood under the Nazis, an angel of death. Marianne the ‘child of snow’, then, and Nico the ‘winter lady’. Let us now turn to the lyrics of ‘Take this Longing’.

1 – As in ‘the sleepy golden storm’ of ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’.

2 – Christophe Lebold, Leonard Cohen: L’Homme qui voyait tomber les anges (Rosières-en-Haye, France: Camion Blanc, 2013) Kindle edition.

1. Many men have loved the bells / You fastened to the rain. Bells celebrate the living, mourn the dead and break the lightning; purification, exorcism and warning may inhere in their ringing. Rain is fecundation and blessing; perhaps in every drop there is an angel. The woman wilfully fastens the bells to the rain. Is she issuing a warning to stay away or an invitation to approach?

2. And everyone who wanted you / They found what they will always want again. At once Tantalus and Sisyphus, the men in pursuit of the woman are condemned to a frustration and repetition that, paradoxically, they experience as ennobling.

3. Your beauty lost to you yourself / Just as it was lost to them. Freud wrote somewhere that women love only themselves, that their self-sufficiency is their charm. The woman here is self-sufficient, but, in contrast to the usual pattern, she is not vain: she has no interest in impassioning men through her beauty, because to do so would be to alienate herself. If the man in his passion is hollowed out by frustration, that’s his problem, not hers: that, it would seem, is her view of the matter.

4. Take this longing from my tongue / Whatever useless things these hands have done. The man pleads for a kiss that would at once end the torment of his desire and redeem the abuse he has inflicted on himself in frustration.

5. Let me see your beauty broken down / Like you would do for one you love. Without comment, I offer here these passages from Georges Bataille’s reflection of eroticism and beauty:¹

Together with an effort to reach continuity by breaking with individual discontinuity, the search after beauty entails an effort to escape from continuity. The twofold effort is never at an end: its ambiguity crystallizes and carries onward the workings of eroticism.

If beauty so far removed from the animal is passionately desired, it is because to possess is to sully, to reduce to the animal level. Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

No-one doubts the ugliness of the sexual act. Just as death does in sacrifice, the ugliness of the sexual union makes for anguish. But the greater the anguish—within the measure of the partners’ strength—the stronger the realization of exceeding the bounds and the greater the accompanying rush of joy. Tastes and customs vary, but that cannot prevent a woman’s beauty (her humanity, that is) from making the animal nature of the sexual act obvious and shocking.

1 – Georges Bataille, Eroticism, tr. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin Books, 2001 [1962/1957] pp. 144-45

6. Your body like a searchlight / My poverty revealed. Here, a passage from Giorgio Agamben¹ may stimulate an interpretation.

One could define nudity as the envelopment that reaches a point where it becomes clear that clarification is no longer possible. It is in this sense that we must understand Goethe’s maxim, according to which ‘beauty can never clarify itself.’ Only because beauty remains to the end an ‘envelopment,’ only because it remains ‘inexplicable’, can appearance—which reaches its supreme stage in nudity—be called beautiful. That nudity and beauty cannot be clarified does not therefore mean that they contain a secret that cannot be brought to light. Such an appearance would be mysterious, but precisely for this reason it would not be an envelopment, since in this case one could always continue to search for the secret that is hidden within it. In the inexplicable envelopment, on the other hand, there is no secret; denuded, it manifests itself as pure appearance. The matheme of nudity is: there is nothing other than this. Yet it is precisely the disenchantment of beauty in the experience of nudity, this sublime but also miserable exhibition of appearance beyond all mystery and all meaning, that can somehow allow us to see, beyond the prestige of grace and the chimeras of corrupt nature, a simple, inapparent human body. This simple dwelling of appearance in the absence of secrets is its special trembling—it is the nudity that signifies nothing and, precisely for this reason, manages to penetrate us.

1 – Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, tr. David Kishik & Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2011) pp. 89-90

7. I would like to try your charity / Until you cry, ‘Now you must try my greed’. In the mode of greed the woman fully inhabits her body and coincides with her self. In the mode of charity, she is displaced from her self and is not at home in her body. If we return to Bataille as cited in #5, we see that a woman in the mode of greed is far more erotic since, in assuming her beauty, she offers her lover more to befoul.

8. And everything depends upon / How near you sleep to me. When the lights are out, touch takes over from sight, silence from sound, scent and taste from sterile distance, enabling the body to communicate in ways words cannot, bringing new possibilities into being.

9. Let me see your beauty broken down / Like you would do for one your love. An alternative stimulant to interpretation of this line from that of Georges Bataille cited in #5 is provided, again, by Giorgio Agamben:¹

The ‘nihilism of beauty,’ common to many beautiful women, consists in reducing one’s own beauty to pure appearance and then exhibiting this appearance with a sort of remote sadness, stubbornly denying the idea that beauty can signify something other than itself. But it is precisely the very lack of illusions about itself—this nudity without veils that beauty thus manages to achieve—that furnishes the most frightful attraction. This disenchantment of beauty, this special nihilism, reaches its extreme stage with fashion models, who learn before all else to erase all expression from their faces. In so doing, their faces become pure exhibition value and, as a result, acquire a particular allure.

1 – Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, tr. David Kishik & Stefan Pedatella (California: Stanford University Press, 2011) p. 88

10. Hungry as an archway / Through which the troops have passed. This evocative simile is akin, in the way it works, to Cohen’s ‘Summer Haiku’:

Silence
and a deeper silence
when the crickets
hesitate

It might be rewritten thus:

Hunger:
An archway
through which the troops
have passed

The thirst evoked by ‘take this longing from my tongue’ is now the hunger of a wide-open mouth, filled with emptiness. Note the military motif of ‘troops’, echoing, for example, the ‘When I was a soldier / And I fought every man for her’ of ‘Winter Lady’. Leonard Cohen:

‘Any man over thirty knows that there’s a war between men and women, a fight to the death. That is, a fight to the psychic death, a struggle for supremacy and a ruthless and vicious contest of wills.’¹

1 – Quoted in Jim Devlin, ed., Leonard Cohen in His Own Words (UK: Omnibus Press, 1998) p. 19. Note that Cohen made this statement in 1974, the year of ‘Take this Longing’ and the album New Skin for the Old Ceremony.

11. I stand in ruins behind you / With your winter clothes, your broken sandal strap. This line echoes ‘And why are you so quiet now / Standing there in the doorway’ from ‘Winter Lady’, and a comparison of the two lines enables us to take the measure of Cohen’s shift from a focus on the woman to a focus on the man: he is aware that she is the site of his secret. It is he that is ‘in ruins’, awaiting, in alchemical terms, transmutation (via the union of opposites, man and woman) from the solve et coagula state he currently is in. The ‘winter clothes’ promise protection, a flight from desire, while the ‘broken sandal strap’, evoking the allure of the foot the sandal both conceals and reveals, suggests the lover is not done with desire. And indeed, the next line confirms this.

12. I love to see you naked over there / Especially from the back. A naked woman seen from the back gives freer rein to the imagination than would a full frontal view of her. This predilection for a rear view reinforces the shift from the woman to the man: it is he who seeks, via sexual union with the woman, ‘the stopping of the mind stuff to breathe the breath of the Eternal’, as the introvertive tradition of mysticism¹ would have it. Here, as in all of Leonard’s work, the lover is first and foremost a pilgrim.

13. Untie for me your hired blue gown / Like you would do for one that you love. Here, the man acknowledges that the woman bears him no love, but refuses to accept defeat in seduction: he asks her to grant him his wish to see her naked. Note that the ‘hired blue gown’ indicates the ephemerality of the role she is now playing for him: she too is a pilgrim, as we saw in ‘Winter Lady’; she too is only ‘passing through’.

1 – See the Encyclopedia Britannica article on ‘Mysticism’.

17. Let me see your beauty broken down / Like you would do for one you love. For the third and final time we return to this line. What else might it mean? I offer these reflections by Francette Pacteau,¹ which I find highly illuminating.

I am interested less in the contingent object of desire than the fantasy which frames it. Since formulations of feminine beauty by men appear to be largely unselfconscious, I take the step of supposing that they might indeed be unconsciously motivated. In other words, the variety of formulations of what is recognized as beauty in a woman would correspond to a variety of (mainly) masculine symptoms. (The term ‘symptom’ here has to be understood in the fully psychoanalytic sense of the word, as indicative of a repressed past.)

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud suggests that, ‘The love of beauty seems a perfect example of an impulse inhibited in its aim.’ He thus points us to the fantasmatic dimension of the experience of beauty. It is a dimension in which we turn from the object of instinct to the object of drive; from the possibility of a one-off satisfaction of need to the impossibility of fulfilment of desire; it is a dimension in which desire, forever invoking interdiction and loss, is articulated in processes of defence and the production of symptoms.

How a man perceives a woman’s beauty, then, offers an indication of what in his past he is repressing. Her beauty is his symptom. This insight confirms Baudrillard’s thesis that ‘what seduces a man in a woman is that she is the site of his secret’. An interpretation of this dynamic in ‘Take this Longing’ could be that, if Leonard gets his way, Jew and Nazi, Leonard and Nico, would—in Leonard’s phantasy—engage in the kind of eroticism we see in, for example, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.² Whatever the case may be, the song, as I’ve tried to show, is one of Leonard’s finest.³

1 – Francette Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty (London: Reaktion Books, 1994) pp. 15-18

2 – The Night Porter, incidentally, was released in the same year as ‘Take this Longing’ and New Skin for the Old Ceremony.

3 – Leonard himself confirms this: ‘I must say I’m pleased with the album [New Skin for the Old Ceremony]. It’s good. I’m not ashamed of it and I’m ready to stand by it. Rather than think of it as a masterpiece, I prefer to look at it as a little gem.’ Quoted in Jim Devlin, ed., Leonard Cohen in His Own Words (UK: Omnibus Press, 1998) p. 62.

TRUE LOVE LEAVES NO TRACES
Leonard Cohen

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you and never will

Through windows in the dark
The children come, the children go
Like arrows with no targets
Like shackles made of snow

True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It’s lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun

As a falling leaf may rest
A moment on the air
So your head upon my breast
So my hand upon your hair

And many nights endure
Without a moon, without a star
So we will endure
When one is gone and far

True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It’s lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun

JE T’AIME MOI NON PLUS
Serge Gainsbourg

Je t’aime, je t’aime, oui je t’aime
Moi non plus
Oh, mon amour
Comme la vague irrésolue

Je vais, je vais et je viens, entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins
Et je me retiens

Je t’aime, je t’aime, oui je t’aime
Moi non plus
Oh mon amour, tu es la vague
Moi, l’île nue

Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens, entre mes reins
Tu vas et tu viens, entre mes reins
Et je te rejoins

Je t’aime, je t’aime, oh oui je t’aime
Moi non plus
Oh, mon amour
Comme la vague irrésolue

Je vais, je vais et je viens, entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins
Et je me retiens

Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens, entre mes reins
Tu vas et tu viens, entre mes reins
Et je te rejoins

Je t’aime, je t’aime, oh oui je t’aime
Moi non plus
Oh, mon amour
L’amour physique est sans issue

Je vais, je vais et je viens, entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens, je me retiens
Non, maintenant, viens

The opening song on Death of a Ladies’ Man, ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’ is an oasis of grace in the desert of ‘dis-grace’ that is the remainder of the album. The lyric is infused with the Zen aesthetic: a state of flux, impermanence, and presence-in-the-moment characterize it, as do simplicity, clarity, and understatement. Leonard’s stays at the Mount Baldy monastery are only the most obvious indications of his affinity with Zen. In ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, the line, ‘You know my love goes with you / As your love stays with me / It’s just the way it changes / Like the shoreline and the sea’, testifies, in its ‘elegant simplicity and articulate brevity’, to the poet’s ‘active calm’ in the face of ‘constant change’—Zen values par excellence. And yet, when it comes to love and sex, is Zen not an impossible ideal? All the other songs on Death of a Ladies’ Man answer ‘Yes’, as does Leonard himself, remember: ‘There’s a war between men and women, a fight to the death. That is, a fight to the psychic death, a struggle for supremacy and a ruthless and vicious contest of wills.’¹ A Zen love relationship or sexual encounter, then, is at best an aspiration. This is exactly what Serge Gainsbourg, in his song, says, although through very different poetic means.

1 – Quoted in Jim Devlin, ed., Leonard Cohen in His Own Words (UK: Omnibus Press, 1998) p. 19.

The second line that speaks of the essence of ‘Je t’aime moi non plus’ is ‘L’amour physique est sans issue’. The most elegant translation of the line is, perhaps, ‘Physical love has no strings attached’, yielding by extension the interpretation, ‘One can make love without love’. When Jane Birkin left Serge Gainsbourg, Serge, in writing the song ‘Physique et sans issue’ for her, did not change his tune but did acknowledge that things are more complicated, as these lines from that lyric show:

L’amour physique est sans issue / Tu le sais, ouais, toi non plus

Je t’aime et toi-même, dis-moi que tu m’aimes / Dis-le-moi, si même cela n’est pas vrai

À dire vrai, il n’y en a pas des masses / De belles histoires de cœur

We are back, then, to the theme of ambivalence in love and sex, and again I assert that ‘Je t’aime moi non plus’ expresses that theme more excitingly—physically and intellectually—than any other song (perhaps) in popular music. Its simultaneous incarnation—in both words and music—of rave-up and requiem, eulogy and elegy, illusion and disillusion, has no match in the song repertoire. Except, of course, in that of Leonard Cohen.

JE SUIS VENU TE DIRE QUE JE M’EN VAIS
Serge Gainsbourg

Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais
Et tes larmes n’y pourront rien changer
Comme dit si bien Verlaine au vent mauvais
Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais

Tu t’souviens des jours anciens et tu pleures
Tu suffoques, tu blêmis à présent qu’a sonné l’heure
Des adieux à jamais
Oui je suis au regret
De te dire que je m’en vais
Je t’aimais, oui, mais

Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais
Tes sanglots longs n’y pourront rien changer
Comme dit si bien Verlaine au vent mauvais
Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais

Tu t’souviens des jours heureux et tu pleures
Tu sanglotes, tu gémis à présent qu’a sonné l’heure
Des adieux à jamais
Oui je suis au regret
De te dire que je m’en vais
Car tu m’en a trop fait

Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais
Et tes larmes n’y pourront rien changer
Comme dit si bien Verlaine au vent mauvais
Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais

Tu t’souviens des jours anciens et tu pleures
Tu suffoques, tu blêmis à présent qu’a sonné l’heure
Des adieux à jamais
Je suis au regret
De te dire que je m’en vais
Oui, je t’aimais, oui, mais

Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais
Tes sanglots longs n’y pourront rien changer
Comme dit si bien Verlaine au vent mauvais
Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais

Tu t’souviens des jours heureux et tu pleures
Tu sanglotes, tu gémis à présent qu’a sonné l’heure
Des adieux à jamais
Oui, je suis au regret
De te dire que je m’en vais
Car tu m’en as trop fait

LEONARD ON MARIANNE

She brought a tremendous sense of order into my life. It was really a great privilege to live in a house with her. She had been brought up by her grandmother in the war so she had the education of an older generation. Just the way that she laid a table or lit candles or cleaned the house, and she wasn’t by any means confined to these activities that have come under the suspicion of feminists. It wasn’t just that she was the Muse, shining in front of the poet. She understood that it was a good idea to get me to my desk.¹

1 – Quoted in Jim Devlin, ed., Leonard Cohen in His Own Words (UK: Omnibus Press, 1998) p. 17

MARIANNE ON LEONARD

All that Marianne will say about the end of the affair is, ‘To me he was still the same, he was a gentleman, and he had that stoic thing about him and that smile he will try to hide behind – “Am I serious now or is all this a joke?” We were in love and then the time was up. We were always friends, and he still is my dearest friend and I will always love him. I feel very lucky to have met Leonard at that time in my life. He taught me so much, and I hope I gave him a line or two.’²

2 – Quoted in Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (London: Vintage, 2012/2016) p. 194

LEONARD IN TEARS

Marshall took Leonard aside. ‘We have to take care of business and finish the show or we might not get out of here in one piece.’ Leonard said, ‘I think what I need is a shave.’ That’s what his mother had told him to do when things got bad. There was a mirror and a basin in the dressing room and someone fetched him a razor. Slowly, serenely, while the crowd clapped and sang in the auditorium, Leonard shaved. When he was done, he smiled. They went back on stage. As Leonard sang ‘So Long, Marianne’, immersing himself in the song he’d written to a woman in a moment in a different, less complicated time, changing her description from ‘pretty one’ to ‘beautiful one’, tears began to run down his face.¹

1 – Quoted in Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (London: Vintage, 2012/2016) p. 250.

The scene is captured in Tony Palmer’s excellent documentary of Leonard’s 1972 European tour, available on DVD: Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire, Tony Palmer, director. France: Blaq Out, 2017.

Gainsbourg’s ‘Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais’ is akin to his ‘L’Eau à la bouche’ in that both songs, in their ravishing arrangements, capture a mood with great precision: ‘gentlemanly lust’ in ‘L’Eau’; the pathos of breaking up in ‘Je suis venu’. The two songs also exude a seductive charm, and both partake of the exercise de style. In contrast to their respective Cohen counterparts, ‘So Long, Marianne’ and ‘Take this Longing’, both Gainsbourg songs, in terms of the attitude expressed in the lyrics, are generic. Indeed, where Leonard’s songs attain a universality through their individuality, Serge’s attain universality through their generic quality. I would argue that Leonard’s lyrics reach deeper than Serge’s precisely because they are drawn from the poet’s subjectivity; they invite us to reach into ourselves to find parallels to the experience the song is articulating. In Serge’s songs, the ‘instant gratification’ of sympathizing with the generic sentiment is, however, counter-balanced by the delight the highly-wrought lyrics procure, both sensually and intellectually.

What is striking in both songwriters is the economy of means by which they achieve their effects. Leonard typically resorts to metaphor and Serge to the intricacies of poetic construction. ‘Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais’ is based on Verlaine’s ‘Chanson d’automne’.

CHANSON D’AUTOMNE
Paul Verlaine

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon cœur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure ;

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

From Verlaine Serge took diction, sonority, and rhythm, as well as the overall mood of the poem, while displacing the ‘je’ and introducing a ‘tu’. Particularly fine is the variation Serge brings to the verses, with ‘larmes’ alternating with ‘sanglots’, ‘jours anciens’ with ‘jours heureux’, ‘tu suffoques’ with ‘tu sanglotes’, ‘tu blêmis’ with ‘tu gémis’, and ‘je t’aimais, oui, mais’ with ‘car tu m’en as trop fait’. If a generic sentiment can never be as incisive as an individualized one, Serge’s exquisitely crafted lyric nevertheless challenges us to look deeper into ourselves.

Along with this verbal sophistication, we find, as always, the Gainsbourg persona: the pride and bitterness of the eternal outsider; the Bogart-like blend of toughness and tenderness; the disillusioned cynic hungry for love. This, then, is the stance Serge adopts in ‘La Javanaise’, and if you’re a Dylan fan, you may recognize that the attitude in Gainsbourg’s lyric is exactly that of Dylan’s in ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’. This hint of little-boy-lost inside hardboiled-hero is never to be found in Leonard Cohen, simply because Leonard is not given to attitudinizing. He never denies his responsibility in relationships, never diminishes the woman to elevate the man. We see, then, that in terms of what the song says—and not how it says it—there is often a complacency in Serge’s lyrics, a complacency never found in Leonard’s.

So, dear reader, to what extent has this experiment in comparison enabled us to see aspects of Leonard Cohen’s and Serge Gainsbourg’s songs from a fresh perspective? For my part, the comparative approach had proved to be surprisingly effective: I would not have gained certain insights had I not resorted to this method. I hope you have found my essay both entertaining and instructive, and I welcome your comments—in English or French—in the comments box below.