“Ne me quitte pas” (don't leave me) is Jacques Brel's 1959 masterpiece. A man begs the woman he loves to stay: let's forget the misunderstandings and the lost time; he'll offer her pearls of rain from countries where it never rains, invent words only she will understand — and, at the lowest point, he'd become the shadow of her shadow, the shadow of her dog, if only she won't leave.
Brel, a Belgian singer-songwriter who conquered Paris, wrote it after a break-up. Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra (as “If You Go Away”) and countless others have sung it since.
His diction is famously precise, and the song is slow. Learn the refrain and the verbs of forgetting and offering, and you'll understand one of the great French texts.