He adhered to famously beautiful women, as lover or court poet or Svengali, or all three. Brigitte Bardot, for example, was very much her own woman well before Gainsbourg came on the scene. He lavished her with wordsóand of course she bathed him in lightóand the two of them fantasized on wax about being Bonnie and Clyde and knocking off cops. Then he met Birkin, English and unknown and very young, hot off the studio floor in Blow-Up (1966). Everybody had the impression that he molded her out of clay, although when you see her on a screen it seems impossible she was ever any different from how she is now: gawkily girlish, charmingly direct, unemphatically shrewd. They made love in public, so to speak, throughout the late '60s: "Je t'aime . . . ," "69 année érotique," various moviesóeven the poster for a picture called Cannabis (1969) just shows the two of them snorching. Their romance, fictionally transposed, became the subject of Gainsbourg's masterpiece, the 1971 concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson.

Despite its brilliance and ambition, or perhaps because of such qualities, Melody Nelson was destined for the shadowy designation of "cult classic," and a dejected Gainsbourg spent the '70s far from inactive but essentially potting around. By the time he burst forth with his reggae "Marseillaise" at the end of the decade, however, he was an icon. The number, titled "Aux armes, et caetera," was a calculated affront, directly inspired by the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen," and indeed it won Gainsbourg death threats from the French right. Scandal was his natural medium. He wrote better melodies than anybody in Europe, his lyrics are strong enough to hold their own on paper (a rarity in pop of any sort), but what the French public knew him best for were orgasms, toilet talk, Nazi jokes, burning a five-hundred-franc note on TV, and eventually informing the nation, in two languages and in so many words, that he wanted to fuck Whitney Houston, who was seated down the dais from him on some typically insufferable French variety show. By that time he looked dissipated beyond all measure. A pioneer of stubble as a fashion statement, he accessorized with, in Sylvie Simmons's words, "rheumy eyes and a waxy complexion, and that kind of sweat that seems to come from the eyes that only very sick people or serious addicts get. . . . [He] hunched over the microphone like the victim of repetitive shrug injury." He had been a professional drunk for decades, and the Gitane was a permanent part of his face. Even in France he stood out as a ticket-holder on the hell-bound train. By the '80s there might have been betting pools as to when he'd kick off.

Gainsbourg is as easy to caricature as he is hard to encompass, especially for nonñFrench speakers. His excesses were easily matched by his subtleties. Who would figure, for instance, that a song called "Lemon Incest"óobvious scandal bait, especially since he sang it with his fifteen-year-old daughterócould actually be sweetly innocent and even heartbreaking? (The Chopin étude he lifted for its melody didn't hurt, of course.) The Frankenstein's monster you'd need to assemble as an American analogy to Gainsbourg would include elements of Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Burt Bacharach, Dean Martin, Norman Mailer . . . and even then you'd miss the arched eyebrow and verbal dandyism that are intrinsically Gallic. Simmons's book is a noble effort, an easy and pleasant read that lets off sudden sparks of wit. It was probably written a bit too fast, but in this country it may be the last word on Gainsbourg.

Luc Sante's books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) and The Factory of Facts (Pantheon, 1998).