Mademoiselle from Armentières

Mademoiselle from Armentières is a popular song woven into U.S.A. in two markedly different forms: as scattered lyric fragments embedded in a Newsreel collage, and as a tune Dick Savage teaches to a group of officers in Brest. The first appearance turns the song into part of a noisy public stream of headlines and popular culture; the second makes it a piece of shared entertainment among American servicemen in France. Together, these moments show how the novel lets a familiar song pass between mass circulation and ordinary social life without making it a governing symbol or a complete narrative in its own right.

Fragmented Lyrics in the Newsreel

The song appears in a sequence of short lines set among reports of political unrest, public disorder, and postwar pressures. Its title refrain is repeated, followed by the word Parleyvoo and another return to the refrain. The collage then offers a broken lyric, a further repetition, and a fragment ending with a rhyme on Hankypanky parleyvoo. Later in the same cluster, additional lines continue the song’s bawdy, suggestive register. The lyrics arrive as pieces rather than as a complete performance; the reader encounters an ear-catching refrain and separated fragments, not a self-contained song text.

The surrounding material moves abruptly among headlines and reports: Wilson’s arrival in Washington, Paris strikers, unrest in Fiume, rising meat prices, political tension in Berlin, and claims about prices after peace. A report concerning damage and employers’ concerns sits near further song fragments. That juxtaposition places popular entertainment beside the news of unrest and economic anxiety without pausing to explain or reconcile the contrast. The song is one voice among the collage’s competing bits of public language, not a narrator’s commentary on any single headline.

This placement reflects the Newsreel’s broader method in U.S.A. The form interrupts the human narratives with actual headlines, news excerpts, advertising slogans, and popular lyrics, assembled in quick, discontinuous succession. Within that structure, Mademoiselle from Armentières is recognizable through recurrence: the refrain returns after other snippets have intervened, while the altered and incomplete lyric pieces keep the song from settling into a continuous performance. Its repetition makes it a memorable strand in a sequence otherwise crowded with changing topics and voices.

From Printed Fragment to Group Performance

The song also appears in an ordinary social scene involving Dick Savage. While stationed at Tours, Dick travels to Brest, where he takes three majors downtown and orders a meal and wine. During the evening, Major Thompson tells stories about the Philippines and the Spanish war. After several bottles, Dick teaches the group to sing Mademoiselle from Armentières. The account presents the song as something he can bring into company: it is not merely a lyric caught in print but a tune that can be performed among fellow servicemen.

This scene gives the song a different kind of presence from its Newsreel appearance. In the collage, its fragments are placed beside public reports, and no singer or audience is identified. In Brest, the narrative identifies a specific occasion and a person teaching the tune to others. The movement from clipped lyrics to a group singing it connects the novel’s impersonal record of circulating popular culture with a particular episode of military life. It does not establish that the song’s performance changes Dick’s position or the officers’ relationships; the text records it as one detail in the evening’s convivial company.

The scene also locates Dick among officers through the social ease he displays in Brest: he arranges the meal and wine, and the group’s evening includes stories and a song. The tune is part of that gathering, not an isolated set piece. Later, Dick is transferred to Tours through Major Thompson’s intervention, but the passage does not identify the song as a cause of the transfer. The distinction matters: the novel gives the song a concrete role in the evening without turning it into an explanation for the larger course of Dick’s military career.

Register, Repetition, and Limits

The surviving lyric fragments mark the song as playful and bawdy, while their interrupted form keeps the text from reproducing a full performance. The repeated refrain and Parleyvoo provide the sequence’s most persistent verbal pattern; the other lines appear in pieces, separated by returns to the refrain or by news items. This is a limited but clear formal effect: repetition makes the song recognizable, and discontinuity makes it one element in an ongoing montage rather than a lyric passage detached from the book’s surrounding material.

The song’s two appearances should not be collapsed into a single scene or a continuous plot thread. The Newsreel gives no identified singer, and the Brest episode does not connect Dick’s performance directly to the headlines. Their relationship is instead one of recurrence across distinct narrative modes. In one, the tune belongs to the circulating language of a period, reproduced in fragments beside public events; in the other, it belongs to a described social gathering. The novel thereby places popular culture both in the impersonal media stream and in the lives of the people moving through its larger historical panorama.

Mademoiselle from Armentières remains a minor expression rather than a character, event, or sustained musical episode. Its significance rests on the exact contrast the book creates: scraps of song recur inside a crowded news collage, while a serviceman later teaches the same tune to officers over an evening in Brest. That modest passage between public repetition and shared performance suits U.S.A.’s broader attention to the forms through which historical experience reaches people—headlines, songs, and the ordinary occasions in which those sounds are taken up.