Le Baiser Modiano

The device

Central track on Kensington Square (2004). Acoustic piano plus chamber arrangements denser than the debut (sustained strings, more enveloping textures). Delerm’s voice: settled, slightly lower than on the first album. Duration: around three minutes. Classic verse-chorus-bridge structure. The interest is entirely in the text and its process.

Text structure

The song describes a sentimental situation — a kiss, or the anticipation of a kiss, or the memory of one. The precise detail varies across available interpretations. What is clear: Patrick Modiano is used as a qualifying adjective. A kiss « à la Modiano » — or « modianesque » — characterises a certain quality of embrace, of presence, of relationship to time.

The text structure is that of a romantic description interrupted by a literary reference — not as digression but as precision. The author cannot find the words, so he borrows a novelist’s name.

The process — the citation as adjective

This is the decisive evolution from Fanny Ardant et moi. In that first track, Fanny Ardant was the subject of the song — the song was addressed to her, she structured it as imaginary addressee. Here, Modiano has become an adjective: he qualifies something else (a kiss, a way of being).

This grammatical evolution of the citation is a considerable formal innovation. It assumes the listener already holds a representation of Modiano precise enough for « à la Modiano » to mean something — something floating, melancholic, Parisian of the 1960s, traversed by lacunary memory and uncertain identity.

Modiano (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2014) is the author of La Place de l’Étoile (1968), Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978), Dora Bruder (1997). His universe: occupied and liberated Paris, characters with blurred identities, lacunary memory, vaporous atmosphere. A kiss « à la Modiano » would therefore be a kiss unsure of itself, existing in suspended time, one that might not have taken place.

The arrangement

Compared to the debut, the strings are sustained rather than pizzicato. The effect is to envelop the piano rather than accompany it. The voice is in a slightly more reverberant space — less living room, more chamber concert. It is a more adult sound, corresponding to the elaboration of the process.

No spectacular production effects: no modulation, no tempo change, no instrumental coda. The track holds its form, as Modiano holds his novels within a constrained narrative form.

Filiation and resonances

The song belongs to a very French tradition of literary reference in song — Brassens cited La Fontaine, Ferré set Baudelaire and Verlaine to music. But Delerm does not set Modiano to music: he uses him as vocabulary, as a word of the French language that has existed since 1968 and holds precise meaning for readers.

Filiation with Bourdieu’s sociology (cited elsewhere in the Delerm repertoire): the literary citation as cultural capital deployed in seduction. To seduce by citing Modiano is also to signal one’s belonging to a milieu — the reading milieu, the Quartier Latin cinema milieu, the milieu that knows what « modianesque » means. Delerm does not conceal this social dimension: he exposes it, with his habitual mild irony.

Within the Delerm catalogue: Le Baiser Modiano is both the culmination of the citation-process and the starting point for its extension. After it, Delerm can cite anyone in any way — the process is established as language, not as trick.

Reading in light of the constants

Constant 1 — The literary-cinematic citation: at its moment of formal accomplishment. The citation is no longer a subject (Fanny Ardant), it is a grammar (the Modiano kiss). Delerm has invented a syntactic extension: the proper noun can become an adjective, can qualify a gesture, can name a quality of being. This is a leap within language, not only within song.

Constant 2 — Domestic observation: present as a watermark. The kiss takes place in an implicit Parisian apartment. The reference to Modiano — novelist of memorial Paris — anchors the song in a precise geographic and social territory: the cultivated Paris of readers, cinephiles, people with libraries.

If Fanny Ardant et moi is the birth of the process, Le Baiser Modiano is its first confirmation: the process holds under pressure, it can evolve, it can abstract. The Delerm method was not a beginner’s lucky strike. It was a method.

Critical review + listening — no reliable score available