To put it quite simply, this is one of the most exquisite songs of the 20th Century. Written during the Second World War, it mixes sentiment, nostalgia, and passion into a heartrending statement.

The bridges of C, sometimes called Ce, are the four "Caesar Bridges" are near Angiers. In 51 B.C.E., the Gauls were defeated there by the Romans. In 1940, the Germans invaded at the same spot, and the French were again defeated.

Louis Aragon, the poet, speaks of the ancient defeat, and the tales of glory that followed. Then he speaks of the present time and the ill-concealed tears for his beloved, abandoned France.

Every line ends with a rhyme to the word "Ce". The vocal line moves syllabically, and the piano part is equally unextravagant. In total, this is one of those heartrending moments in music that achieves its goals through simple means.

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1.C ('J'ai traversé les ponts de Cé)

"C" is one of Poulenc's most beautiful songs, one of his few direct responses to the German conquest of France in World War II.

Poet Louis Aragon joined the Resistance after the German occupation. He must have been high on the Gestapo hit list, for he was a founder of the surrealist movement—one of the artistic currents labeled "entartete" (degenerate) by the Nazis. Even worse, he had been a dedicated Communist and supporter of Stalin since 1927. His role in the Resistance was to encourage and organize the intellectual Resistance movement.

Poulenc set two of Aragon's Resistance poems in September and October of 1942 and arranged for them to be clandestinely and anonymously published. The two poems do not constitute a song cycle, even though they are united in the anti-Occupation sentiment that is underneath the surface of their texts. Rather, they are two songs conceived as separate and complete statements, published together for convenience.

Aragon evokes the age of chivalry in ancient France, both in his imagery and in his choice of verse form, selecting a Medieval and Renaissance convention of using the same rhyme in each of its 18 lines. (They all rhyme with "Cé," an abbreviation for a place where bridges cross the Loire, and the ending of the first and last lines.)

The opening verses of the poem depict the poet recalling those ancient chivalric days while crossing one of the bridges: Images of a wounded knight, the castle of a "mad duke," and a meadow where an "eternal betrothed" dances.

The poet jerks back to reality. Now he sees "the overturned cars and the unprimed weapons and the ill-dried tears."

"O my France, O my forsaken France," concludes the song, "I have crossed the bridges of C."

Poulenc himself described the texture of the song in the valuable record of his song-writing career, Journal de mes melodies (Diary of my Songs) by pointing out its difficult pedaling and its use of quarter-note chords. These, he says, "should be veiled."

His great interpreter, Pierre Bernac, considered it essential that the pianist no less than the singer achieve a perfect legato (smooth flow from note to note). Bernac, writing in his book Francis Poulenc, The Man and his Songs, assessed it as "one of his most deeply moving and successful works." Fellow composer Charles Koechlin agreed, stating that it "breathes the soul of our wounded homeland" (quoted by Benjamin Ivry in his biography of Poulenc).

Although Fêtes Gallantes can be regarded as a companion piece of "C" in subject matter—for the latter song continues with descriptions of the bitterness and absurdities of life under the Nazi Occupation—musically it quite breaks the magic spell of "C" and so this more tender of the two songs is better left to itself.

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2.Fêtes galantes ('On voit des marquis sur des bicyclettes')

Poulenc answered Germany's World War II occupation of France by composing this bitter parody of a music hall patter song. The poet, Louis Aragon, was a founder of the surrealist movement and a confirmed member of the Communist Party since 1927. He often used his poetry to advance his Stalinist agenda, but when he emerged as a head of the French Resistance's efforts among the intellectuals of the country, he also wrote Resistance poetry that expressed what most French felt at the time, regardless of their peacetime political orientation. Poulenc set two of Aragon's poems, which he arranged to have published clandestinely and anonymously. The first is the poetic song "C," contrasting touching, melancholy imagery of ancient chivalric days in France with an image of a bombed-out road near a crossing of the Loire. Fêtes Galantes appeared in the same clandestine edition but does not play well after "C." Musically, it breaks the spell of "C," even though its text follows logically after the words of "C." While Aragon consciously evoked a period of France's past in the "C," here he ironically applies a title Watteau used in painting and Verlaine in poetry. But whereas these two creative artists of earlier times were celebrating grace and beauty, Aragon points out the ugliness—and the absurdity of the ugliness—of the period of Occupation. Every line except the last is a miniature portrait of yet another horror, always presented in the same way: "You see [On voit] fops on bicycles, you see pimps in kilts...you see motor cars run on gasogene...you see guttersnipes you see perverts, you see drowned folk...." This entire litany, eerily comic in its piling-on of horrors, rattles out from a music-hall accompaniment as the baritone declaims the text with extreme rapidity. Poulenc applies the tempo marking Incroyablement vite (Unbelievably Fast), with a tempo marking not less than quarter note = 152. Like Shostakovich did so often, Poulenc here confronts the drab, valueless life under a dictatorship with the commonplace, with banality, with the sound of a low cabaret.

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