La chanson du jour - French songs 101

Serge Gainsbourg and Juliette Gréco: La Javanaise (1963)

I felt like staying with Serge Gainsbourg and in my opinion La Javanaise is one of his best songs. On YouTube this video is one of the early version. I saw a reference to a service offered by the French Institut National de l'Audiovisuel at ina.chansons.fr . Unfortunately the visit to their site proved a complete failure: very slow download and impossibility to listen more than a few seconds. It's too bad as they could really offer a lot of good documents if they could get their acts together. I am afraid they are too bureaucratic for that. I did not know the song had been initially written for Juliette Gréco.

Lyrics

Juliette Gréco: Si tu t'imagines (1950)

The first song by Juliette Gréco. Lyrics by the writer Raymond Queneau and music by Joseph Kosma. The bio is more detailed in the French Wikipedia (of course).
Lyrics
Amazon MP3