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by Camille Thierry (1814 - 1875)

Clair de la Lune
Language: French (Français) 
Pourquoi montrer ta face blême?
Lune, pourquoi briller ce soir?
Quand tu parais, l'enfant que j'aime
Craint toujours de se laisser voir.
Les blancs rayons de ta lumière
La montreraient sur mes genoux...
Et l'on irait dire à sa mère:
Votre fille a des rendez-vous.

Je pourrai presser son corsage,
Je pourrai toucher ses cheveux,
Si tu te mets dans le nuage
Qui traverse l'air pur des cieux.
Ne sois pas sourde à ma prière:
Cache-toi, lune, cache-toi!...
Elle aime la nuit, le mystère,
Quand son coeur la conduit vers moi!...

Je t'aurai dans ma poésie,
Je t'aurai dans son doux regard,
Si tu mets ta tête jolie
Dans l'enveloppe du brouillard.
Ta lumière encore étincelle
Sur le feuillage de nos bois...
Disparais; je l'entends; c'est elle
Des fleurs couvrent ses jolis doigts!

Confirmed with Creole echoes: the francophone poetry of nineteenth-century Louisiana, trans. Norman R. Shapiro, ed. M. Lynn Weiss, Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2004, page 222.


Text Authorship:

  • by Camille Thierry (1814 - 1875), "Clair de la Lune" [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by John L. Cornelius II (b. 1966), "Clair de la Lune", published 2006, copyright © 2006 [ voice and piano ] [sung text not yet checked]

Researcher for this page: Garrett Medlock [Guest Editor]

This text was added to the website: 2021-03-18
Line count: 24
Word count: 133

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