Happy Valentine’s Day! C’est le 14 février*. Le jour des amoureux ! (It’s the 14th of February. The day of lovers!) In honor of the day, I thought a little song about love was in order. Malheureusement (Sadly), l’amour n’est pas toujours facile ! (love isn’t always easy!) So while today’s song is about love, it’s about the worst kind of love . . . unrequited love. Heureusement (Happily), it also has a lot of great new vocabulary!

This week’s song is from Dorothée, the very popular star of French television and music in the 1970’s and 80’s. For many years she led the team of one of the most popular kids TV shows, Récré A2 (and later on the competing TF1, Club Dorothée). **

* Check out this post for a quick review of all the months of the year in French.
** Back in the day, France only had 3 TV stations: TF1, Antenne 2, and France 3. Dorothée’s first show was on Antenne 2 (A2) before she was wooed away to TF1. Récré is short for ‘récréation‘ the French word for “recess“.
*** Elision of ‘tu as’
**** ‘Il faut que . . . ‘ is a very handy expression in French. It means ‘you must’, ‘you have too’, ‘it is required that’ start here and other variations of the sort. As here, it is usually followed by everyone’s least favorite grammatical form, the subjunctive. If you want to learn more, for a great series of posts by fellow French blogger Elizabeth Schmemund on the complicated but useful world of the subjunctive!
***** Remember that some punctuation marks in French require a space before and after them!
^ ‘avoir le cafard’ literally means ‘to have the cockroach’. It means to be sad, or blue.
^^ ‘restent en carafe’ literally ‘to stay in the jar/carafe’
^^^ ‘broient du noir’ literally ‘to crush some black’ (thought by some to come from painting when artists had to crush their own pigments to make paint; if you wanted to paint a dark or sad scene, you would have to crush a lot of black).