As promised, another “story song” this week to help you with your French. I find that des chansons (songs) – especially ones like this with extended spoken sections – can be very helpful in working on your listening comprehension skills and to model your own pronunciation on.

* Visit this post for a review of the differences between ‘an’ and ‘année’ … and another great retro song to practice your French!
** ‘L’Année dernière^ à Marienbad’ (Last Year at Marienbad) is the 1961 Golden Lion (‘le lion d’or’) award-winning film based on a screenplay by the French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet that, like this song, tells the story of a love story whose end (and middle and beginning!) are shrouded in mystery. You can watch the original trailer (in French with English subtitles) here.
*** ‘cape et d’épée’ which litterally means ‘cape and sword’ is akin to the English ‘cloak and dagger’ but also what we might refer to as “swashbuckler”. The term refers to a certain cinematographic (and literary) genre that encompasses adventure movies (and books) whose stories take place from the middle ages to the start of the French Revolution and involve love stories, sword fights, nobles vs. common people, and everything else you might imagine . . . the ‘Les Trois Mousequetaires’ (‘The Three Musketeers).
**** ‘les volets’ (‘shutters’) are much more common in France than in America. At my host family’s house, the last thing we did every night before bed was to go around and close all the ‘volets’ on all the ‘fenetres’ (windows). Le matin (in the morning), we would start the day by reversing the process. For someone who grew up in a town where we left the keys in the car in the driveway, closing the house up for the night always seemed odd to me . . . but then again, I didn’t grow up in a suburb of Paris!
***** The French term for “weeping willow” is ‘saule pleureur’.

^ Do you know the difference between ‘l’année dernière’ and ‘la dernière année’ (or for that matter ‘le mois dernier’ and ‘le dernier mois’)? ‘l’année dernière’ means ‘last year’ … ‘la dernière année’ means ‘the last month’ as in ‘la dernière année de l’école’ (‘the last year of school’) . . . ‘mois’  is of course ‘month’. N’oubliez pas (Don’t forget), word order matters in French!