He was the lover singing of desire, jealousy (La Jalousie), forbidden sex, transgression (Petite), complete love (La Lettre), erosion, habit, with more depth and taking more risk than anyone else.(1)Like Debussy, it took Léo Ferré (1916 - 1993) a while to find lasting love, and he found it in Marie-Christine Diaz, his third wife and an exile from Spain.
He met his first wife, Odette Schunck, in 1940 in Castres in the South of France. Odette had fled the German occupation together with her parents. After serving the war effort in Algeria and back in Monaco, Ferré visited Odette by bicycle from Monaco. She was blonde and beautiful, and worked at times as a model.
The couple married in 1943 and first lived on a farm. They moved to Paris a year later. On the way they stopped in Lyon where Ferré composed Les Amants de Lyon, which later became Les Amants de Paris. Let's hear this song performed by Edith Piaf.
Léo and Odette settled down in Paris. Odette's father, Manager at the Théâtre de l’Étoile, gave his son-in-law one year to make a go of his music career. Oddly enough, Léo never performed at the Théâtre de l’Étoile. Ferré's early years were financially difficult, and this put a strain on the relationship. (2)
Years later in the 1973 text Et… basta!, a sort of self-assessment, he writes (@ 9:25 in the video):
I am the old crankcase of a Hispano-Suiza
A first wife: six years of administrative gluiness
A second wife: eighteen years of administrative gluiness
According to Ferré's math the couple thus separated after six years of marriage. The divorce was finalized in December 1950. A little before, he wrote the song La Vie d'Artiste (The Artist's Life) in which he wishes Odette well. It is clear that Ferré had no doubt about his artistic worth and eventual success. The song was written together with Francis Claude.
But, if you thought at age twenty
That one can live from the spirit of the times,
Your point of view is no longer the same.
...
You have beautiful days left
Enjoy them, my poor love,
The beautiful years go by quickly
And now you're leaving,
Both of us will grow old
Each on our own, how sad.
You can take the record player,
I keep the piano
I continue my Artist's Life
Later without knowing very well why
A stranger, a klutz,
Reading my name on a poster
Will tell you about my success,
But at bit sad you who knows
You will tell him I don't care...
That I don't care...
And then there is the poem Madame Ex, included in Poète... Vos Papiers! (written early 1950s, publ. 1956) and the text in Testament phonographe (1980), written in the style of François Villon's Testament of 1461, which give a few more details about Odette's material desires and a lover, and--in the Testament--his feelings about the in-laws. These writings seem to shed a light on the following song:
La femme adultère (The adulterous woman) (1950) in which Ferré, in a decidedly less charitable mood than in La Vie d'Artiste and never one to hold back, describes a man at his wits' end:
When it blew on your blouse
The wind of mercy
As one hung at the end of his rope
I rocked
When it blew on our journeys
The wind of despair
As one hung on the gallows
I dried out
And when it will blow love
On the sails of your beautiful vessel
So that nobody can laugh at it
I will kill you
In 1951 Odette marries a Swedish man and disappears from the public eye. By that time Ferré has long moved on, as we will see in my next post.
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(1) Free translation, Jacques Layani, "Léo Ferré, Mon Dieu, qu’il était con !» suivi de Madeleine pour mémoire." Blogpost, Mediapart, 08/01/2013. (https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-claude-leroy/blog/010813/leo-ferre-mon-dieu-qu-il-etait-con-suivi-de-madeleine-pour-memoire (09/10/2016))
(2) Catherine Aygalinc, "Odette Schunck, épouse Ferré." Léo Ferré, Etudes et Propos, 02/21/2007. (http://leoferre.hautetfort.com/archive/2007/02/21/odette-schunck-epouse-ferre.html (09/10/2016))