How a French lover can be good for your health! #spshow

I just saw this and had to share it. On the surface, it isn't erotic at all, unless of course you are, like me, a sucker (and I mean a sucker) for a French accent. If a lover would only recite me the following while twisting my slender limbs about his muscled Gallic frame... Anyway.

It is generally known - and has been proven over years of research - that learning a foreign language can delay the onset of Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain conditions, simply by giving the brain a workout as it recalls and translates... And made all the better if one's Gallic lover simultaneously gives one's body a workout with an infeasibly passionate gymnastic bedroom display. Stop it! Anyway. While reading a letter written in response to an article on such research in a recent copy of New Scientist magazine, I saw a mention of a little book, one ostensibly written in Old French. The English-speaking correspondent related how his French workmates had read aloud what was to them utter nonsense while being totally nonplussed by his unbridled mirth.

So here we are. The point of all this. From a book impossibly cleverly entitled Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames, is the equally impossibly cleverly entitled poem, Un petit d'un petit. If you have yet to see the impossible cleverness of this, bear with me, picture Maurice Chevalier innocently-yet-somehow-creepily singing to a leetle girl, and read the following.

Un petit d'un petit

S'étonne aux Halles

Un petit d'un petit

Ah! degrés te fallent

Indolent qui ne sort cesse

Indolent qui ne se mène

Qu'importe un petit d'un petit

Tout Gai de Reguennes.

The poem, from a collection purportedly 'discovered, edited and annotated' by Antin van Rooten is an example of homophonic translation, from English to French. The French would confound a Frenchie, for it is mere nonsense, but the sound of it, the delicious Gallic lilt of it is simply, gloriously, wonderfully... Humpy Dumpty sat on a wall. And the title of the book? Yes, you guessed it: Mother Goose Rhymes. 

How clever is that?