Promenoir des deux amants

Auprès de cette grotte sombre

Crois mon conseil, chère Climène

Je tremble en voyant ton visage

Having devoted himself for most of his career as a song composer to modern poets - Verlaine most prominent among them - Debussy turned his attention at a comparatively late stage in his development to three poets of the distant past, Charles d’Orléans, Tristan l’Hermite and François Villon. This does not mean, however, that there was anything remote in his settings of their verse. Tristan l’Hermite, for example, was in a sense as near to him as Paul Verlaine, whose poetry had been a source of inspiration to him for nearly twenty years. Looking at the text of Le Promenoir des deux amants, it is not difficult to see what attracted him to them. L’Hermite had died more than two hundred and fifty years before Debussy set those poems in 1910 but here, extraordinarily, were three clear anticipations of situations in Pelléas et Mélisande. The seventeenth-century lovers have their mysterious grotto by the sea, their shy love scene by the fountain and their fears expressed in metaphors drawn from the water. Debussy’s music here is more restrained than in his opera but, in its intimacy and its subtle archaisms, no less eloquent.