Aragon et Castille

The song begins like a simple, repetitive tale: a girl in Aragon likes lemon and vanilla ice cream, while a boy in Castile sells those flavors. The speaker interrupts this story to say he prefers chocolate, but when the pastry shop has none, he eats camembert instead. The mood stays playful and deliberately silly, moving between the repeated tale and the speaker’s digressions.

Several jokes depend on sound and double meanings. “Poils au bras” (“hair on the arm”) is an absurd rhyme-tag after a line about chocolate; similar phrases about feet keep the rhythm going rather than adding to the story. “Revenons à nos moutons” literally means “let’s get back to our sheep,” but it is an idiom for returning to the subject. The song then twists it into “our lambs,” keeping the sheep joke alive. Later, “tout a fondu” means everything melted, while the following phrase plays on “fond” (the bottom or basis of something) and “fond” as a form of “melt.”

The ending gives the repeated story a small, comic consequence: because Aragon and Castile are separate places, the girl and boy do not connect, so she goes without ice cream and his stock melts. This may gently poke fun at a business that depends on customers being in the right place, but it need not carry a deeper message. Much of the pleasure lies in nonsense sounds, unexpected rhymes, and the way the song keeps wandering away from its own plot.