AUX JEUNES DEMOISELLES
I offer you the Constitution in Vaudeville! O you who all are made to know as the most beautiful ornament of nature, who are born the sovereign of the most precious Empire, fruitful with our homages, young offspring of a shy and weaker sex, yet powerful; follow, follow on all universal competition, the general progress towards the better, and that each day refines the gentleness and innocence of your habits.
Air: De la Croisée
You who reign by your charm,
Amiable gender and always the same,
Cure these poor Frenchmen,
Of their extreme blindness:
In the name of France and the King,
At your first power
Return, and soon the law
like you, will please.
It is not at the heart of crime
That one feels a tender delirium
Love needs peace
To spread far across its empire
The wise man is wrong to condemn
The mischief that love makes one commit
When its charm sweeps you up
One thinks only of pleasure.
I know the absolute remedy
In all places against licentiousness
And I would have liked to see it used
Much earlier in our France
But Frenchmen are so clever
That, despite the god that I implore,
He will retake the mutinous mind
To cure himself again.
