Au Clair de la Lune (By the Pale Moonlight)

DESCRIPTION: French. A man (Harlequin?) asks his friend Pierrot to lend him a pen and open the door, Pierrot suggests he ask the brunette next door. "Someone looked for a pen,... I don't know what was found / But I do know that those two shut the door behind them"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1860 (recording, Leon Scott de Martinville), but the song is usually dated to the 18th century or before (see NOTES)
LONG DESCRIPTION: French. A man (Harlequin?) asks his friend Pierrot to lend him a pen and open the door, that he may write a note by moonlight. Pierrot responds that he's in bed and doesn't have a pen; he suggests that his friend ask the brunette next door. He does, and "in the light of the moon you can barely see anything / Someone looked for a pen, someone looked for a flame / ...I don't know what was found / But I do know that those two shut the door behind them". (In one version, there's also a verse about not opening the door to a baker or a cobbler.)
KEYWORDS: foreignlanguage sex nightvisit friend
FOUND IN: US(MW) Canada France
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Berry-FolkSongsOfOldVincennes, p. 52, "Au clair de la lune (In the Glow of Moonlight)" (1 text + translation, 1 tune)
Fireside-Book-of-Folk-Songs, p. 74, "Au Clair de la Lune (By the Pale Moonlight)" (1 text with translation, 1 tune)
RECORDINGS:
Leon Scott de Martinville, 1860
NOTES [231 words]: The first line of the song's second verse appears as the first known sound recording that has been reproduced, Leon Scott de Martinville's 1860 phonautograph record. Because it was extensively used as a child's beginning piano piece, "Au Clair de la Lune" is widely known in the USA. In some versions, the song references the French version of Commedia Dell'Arte via the names (Harlequin, Pierrot, and presumably Columbine), but it's not known whether these were oiriginally part of the song, or later graftings.
Fireside-Book-of-Folk-Songs credits "Verses 1 and 2 by Charles Fonteyn Manney, music by J. B. Lully." Since Manney was born in 1872, twelve years after the Phonautograph recording of "Au Clair de la Lune," this attribution seems unlikely. - PJS
Giles Booker says this "may be one of the best known of French nursery songs generally and the one first learnt by many French children. It seems to have surfaced in the 1790s in Paris although the tune has been ascribed, without much evidence, to Lully but seems, more firmly, to have been known as a popular dance tune in the second half of the eighteenth century" (Gilles Booker, "'Malbrouk, s'en va-t-en guerre' or, How History Reaches the Nursery," essay in Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, editors, Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 136). - RBW
Last updated in version 6.4
File: BerV052

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