C'est Magnifique

C’est Magnifique

I can remember my father complaining that he couldn’t hear the words to all my songs. By “my” he meant “modern,” of course, but I must confess that they were in no way mine in reality. Like all of us, I was a child of my generation.

Now that I am grown and find myself echoing many of the things my father said, I realise that my father was right. It is impossible to decipher the lyrics to the songs of later generations. I content myself with the thought that they’re probably not worth hearing anyway.

This general descent into incomprehensibility does occasionally go the other way, however. The single example of misheard lyrics that I can remember from my childhood was an example of this. It was an old song from the 1953 musical, Can-Can; a very French number entitled C’est Magnifique.

I have never seen the show but the radio played Maurice Chevalier’s version of the song incessantly in the early sixties. As a result, I just have to read the lyrics and I hear them being delivered in Chevalier’s outrageous accent. But the song was much more than an annoying reminder of how much I disdained the music of my father’s generation in those days. It was also, as I have mentioned, the source of the most memorable of my many misheard lyrics.

The verse in question goes as follows:

But when, one day,
Your loved one drifts away,
Ooh-la-la-la, it's so tragique!
But when, once more,
She whispers "Je t'adore!”
C'est magnifique!

It was that second to last line that got me. What I heard was, “She whispers through the door.” That caused me at least ten years of pondering on why she had to whisper through a door. I was learning French during that decade but never did it strike me that this was the key to my misunderstanding.

The exact moment when the scales fell from my ears is lost in the mists of time. All I know is that one day I heard the song again and the truth dawned on me.

Not that it made much difference. Even though I know the actual words now, I cannot hear the song without being confronted once more with the lady doing her best to be heard through a closed door. She’d have done so much better if allowed to shout!


Word count: 396
For Memorable Malaprops/Mondegreens Contest, July 2023
Prompt: A personal memory of misheard lyrics - max 499 words.