Brassens is an icon, very hard to reproduce at all, even in French.

Take the Beatles songs: their semantic meaning is at most half of the message. Anybody else doing them, in the original language or translated, has the choice between close mimicry (being a "Beatles Revival Band" still can earn you a decent living, but no artistic reputation) and reinterpretation.

Many lyrics acclaimed for their suggestive quality look mediocre when examined with a magnifying glass, like the splendid colours of some tropical butterflies. No chance of extracting the pigment. (Recently we discussed "Me and Bobby McGee" to that effect.)

What do you mean by 'rhymes on the closing "...re"'? GB chooses between classical and colloquial metric rules as suits him, which you may regard as an unfair advantage, but not making your task any more difficult.