Beaubourg exhibits verses and prose by Gainsbourg under glass

• The Public Information Library of the Center Pompidou (Paris 4th) hosts until May 8 the exhibition

  Serge Gainsbourg, the exact word

  .

  Free entry.

  The place is open on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.;

  Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and closed on Tuesdays.

• Manuscripts, typescripts and other curiosities make up this exhibition which approaches the work of Gainsbourg through the literary prism.

  She reconstructs her sources of inspiration and her writing methods.

• “With Gainsbourg, it is the phoneme [the sound] that is the most important.

  He makes associations of words, that gives him a theme and that leads to a poem,” explains Anatole Maggiar, co-curator of the exhibition.

“Let the little papers speak”, wrote Serge Gainsbourg in the song popularized by Régine.

The opportunity is given to us to listen to what they have to say to us.

Dozens of manuscripts, typescripts, newspaper articles and other curiosities - such as these book pages torn out to preserve their author's dedications - are brought together in the Public Information Library (Bpi) of the Center Pompidou in Paris.

They make up the exhibition

, which approaches the work of the artist from the literary side.

Free and open until May 8, it allows you to reconstruct the sources of inspiration and the writing process of the man who created some 550 songs between 1954 and 1990.

“It is touching to see his relationship to paper, ink, books”, confides to

Anatole Maggiar, co-curator of the exhibition.

At the beginning of the visit, several books from the artist's library await the curious.

"There are those who marked his childhood, like the

of Andersen, and a whole section of classic literature, like

by Benjamin Constant, who meant a lot to him, or

by Huysmans", continues our guide.

Alongside a collection of poems by Rimbaud or The

Zweig, there are more surprising works, such as

by Francis Picabia.

We thus learn that he was keen on Dadaism and surrealism.

Exquisite corpses and caesuras

We (re) also discover that reading

by Vladimir Nabokov was “a real shock” for the artist.

He dreamed of adapting the poem from the novel into a song.

“But the rights were blocked by the production of Stanley Kubrick's film, explains Anatole Maggiar, co-curator of the exhibition.

So he had to play with the paraphrases and it came up with

 "

The part of the course devoted to “the Gainsbourg method” is the most interesting.

“For him, it's the phoneme [the sound] that is most important.

He makes associations of words, this gives him a theme and this leads to a poem, says Anatole Maggiar.

There is this idea of ​​collage, of the exquisite corpse, borrowed from the surrealist movement which was dear to him.

He searches for the catchy word, the complex rhyme, plays with caesuras like in

.

The lyrics of this song appear on one of the walls to make clear this process consisting in rejecting the end of a word at the beginning of the following line: "Under no pretex…/…te, I do not want/have reflex …/…are unhappy…” An unstoppable poetic license to ensure rhymes in “ex”.

“Nothing is lost for Gainsbourg, everything is recovered”

The A4 sheets, some covered in ink, others left three-quarters blank, testify to the search for rhymes between two erasures.

For

, for example, the artist had thought of "no sense", "dance", "intense", "in advance" and "my reminiscences" which he ultimately did not retain in the text. final.

It is also amusing to look at the lists of titles that Serge Gainsbourg considered, in 1981, for the respective studio albums of Alain Chamfort and Catherine Deneuve.

That of the first, finally titled

, could have been called "Sleeping, a chance to dream", "Straw girl", "Malaise in Malaysia" or "Remember to forget me"... which became the title from the album of the second.

For the actress, Gainsbourg had also thought of "Fine lingerie, novelties", "Chiara's stuffed animals", "Jolie laide", "Alice alas" or "Jet Society" which had also been proposed to Chamfort.

“Nothing is lost for Gainsbourg, everything is recovered.

The material thrown on the ground is never swept away,” explains Anatole Maggiar.

Sometimes it is the collective culture that recycles.

The exhibition ends by evoking Gainsburgian creations that have fallen into everyday language, such as “No Comment” or “Je t'aime… moi non plus”, which has inspired several titles of newspaper articles.

As many front pages as Serge Gainsbourg had not hesitated to add to his collection of “petits papiers”.

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• Culture

• Serge Gainsbourg

• Centre Pompidou

• Paris

• Ile-de-France

• Music

• French song

• Books