Lisa had a French assignment due on Sunday evening. She had to choose a poem from Book IV of Victor Hugo's Contemplations and then send in a ten-minute audio file in which she presented the poem, explained her choice, read the poem and finally suggested a parallel with a painting. All the poems in the collection deal with the same subject: the disappearance of Victor Hugo's daughter, Léopoldine, and how sad this death made him. The poem Lisa chose was entitled ‘A quoi songeaient les deux cavaliers dans la forêt’ (‘What were the two horsemen thinking about in the forest’).

In the notes accompanying the transcript, we're going to look at liaisons in French. When do we do them? When don't we? And so on. Liaisons are particularly important in poetry, because they sometimes make it possible to obtain the required number of feet, for example to form an alexandrine. But what about in everyday life? We'll be comparing the liaisons in today's text and in Victor Hugo's poem.

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