Caricature by Léandre
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
THE CHANSONNIER PIERRE TRIMOUILLAT
Many of Trimouillat’s satires and parodies have been interpreted by the most talented men and women of the French stage.
In Trimouillat, Xavier Privas found a right-hand man for his new cabaret La Veine.
Xavier Privas is not at all the type of poet one would expect to find among the bards of the Butte. Tall, of powerful physique, with the voice of a Falstaff and a genial hospitable manner, he looks much more like a big, blustering, gallant cavalry officer, and this is precisely what he once was.
It is Privas who wrote the delicate fantasy full of color, of lightness, and of pathos, “Le Testament de Pierrot,” and it is he who has written others upon a hundred themes on love and war under the titles of “Chanson de Révolte” and “Chanson d’Aurore.”
His verse is musical and his song contains that which is finished and beautiful.
Some of these bards are tall and thin, wearing their hair long as did the troubadours and the minstrels of the Middle Ages; others are dapper and business-like, wear sensible modern clothes, and get their hair cut regularly.