Edith, more Parisian than the Seine
Marlene Dietrich called her “The soul of Paris” and it is that the life of Édith Giovanna Gassion (1915-1963) is inextricably linked to this city and above all to belleville , a working-class neighborhood in the east of the French capital where she was born and where she took her first steps as an artist. She is the daughter of an alcoholic singer and a street acrobat who abandoned her in the brothel run by her grandmother. Édith's life could not have started worse . However, her fate and an unusual voice made her a legend. We have reconstructed her biography. We reconstruct her biography in a visit to the most iconic places in the life of this great artist.
1)The Edith Piaf Museum:
This little museum is one of those hidden treasures of Paris, away from the crowds eager to visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. In the heart of Belleville, it is actually the tiny apartment where la Môme (the girl in French) lived in 1933. Her owner, Bernard Marchois, who met Édith Piaf as a teenager, patiently and carefully gathers personal objects of the artist.
The strains of “Je ne regrette rien”, one of the singer's most famous songs, surprise us at the entrance to the apartment and immediately a piece of Édith Piaf's intimacy reveals itself to us: one of her mythical black dresses, some shoes size 34, the teddy bear that her last husband, Théo Sarapo, gave her, some gloves belonging to the great love of her life, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, posters, letters... We curious, we look and we get excited while that voice of magical registers now sings "under the sky of Paris lovers walk".
Bernard, with a serious face, shows us an image on the wall of the artist. “It is the actual size of Édith. 1.48 centimeters. She was tiny!” she exclaims. . But what was Édith Piaf really like? What do you remember most about her?” I ask. He seems reluctant to answer but finally notes cautiously: “She was a very funny woman: she was always joking but when it came to work she was the most serious person in the world”. The somewhat tyrannical character of the singer was well known that when she found inspiration she did not hesitate to call her collaborators at the most untimely hours.
I persist with the questions but Bertrand is firmly determined to keep the secrets of his beloved Édith from him at all costs. Pity.
To visit the museum you have to call +33143555272. Visits from Monday to Wednesday from 1:00 pm - 17 pm. Free entrance. Donations accepted.
The Edith Piaf Museum
2)Belleville, your neighborhood
On December 19, 1915 Édith Giovanna Gassion was born at number 72 rue de Belleville where a plaque recalls that: "On the steps of this house Édith Piaf was born on December 19, 1915 in the most absolute poverty, whose voice would change the world". According to legend, her father got drunk to celebrate her birth and left her mother, Annetta Maillard alone, who, plagued by contractions, went out trying to get to the hospital. The young woman did not have time and she had to face the birth on the same sidewalk . However, everything seems to indicate that Édith was actually born at Tenon Hospital, a few steps from her home. The little girl lived until she was five years old at her maternal grandmother's house rue Rébeval, in the same neighborhood of Belleville.
3) The place where her life changed forever: the corner of rue Troyon and rue Mac-Mahon
Although Piaf's universe takes place in the streets of Belleville and Ménilmontant, it will be far from these popular neighborhoods that the singer's life will change forever. In October 1935, at the confluence of Troyon Street and the elegant Mac-Mahon Avenue, near the Arc de Triomphe, a young Edith barely 20 years old she interprets the fashionable songs between the pedestrians. An elegant man stops to listen dazzled . It is Louis Leplée, owner of the cabaret le Gerny's, who will sponsor the singer until her death under mysterious circumstances. He will be the one to give her her famous stage name: La Môme Piaf (sparrow in French), alluding to her petite complexion.
4) His great love of hers: Marcel Cerdan and Rue Leconte-de-Lisle
Édith Piaf lived intense passions and turbulent loves but if there is a man who went down in history for being the great love of her life, that is, without a doubt, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, whom she met in New York in 1947 . In April 1948 the two lovers moved to this mansion at 7 rue Leconte-de-Lisle . Édith is at her personal and artistic climax, but her tragic fate inevitably catches up with her again: Cerdan dies in a plane crash when he flies from Paris to New York to visit her in 1949. A grief-stricken Edith posthumously dedicates her famous “Himno al amor”, one of the most beautiful love songs ever written. (Metro: Michel-Angel Auteil)
5)Edith Piaf Square
This square is, how could it be otherwise, in the Belleville neighbourhood, and is also a must-see for the artist's fetishists. On October 11, 2003, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the disappearance of Édith Piaf, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, inaugurated a bronze statue of the singer just a few meters from the Tenon hospital where she was born in 1915. And nothing better than contemplating the bronze statue from the terrace of the Place Édith Piaf Bar (Metro: Porte de Bagnolet)
6) Pere-Lachaise Cemetery
Piaf died at the age of 48 in the south of France. But her wish was to be buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, near the neighborhood where she began her life of success and tragedy. You will find her tomb in division 97 of the famous necropolis . On her grave, as an epitaph, the final phrase of hers “Hymn to Love” (“Dieu réunit ceux qui s'aiment”, that is, “God brings together those who love each other”). Every day her admirers deposit messages and flowers next to her grave as a posthumous tribute to the artist she, buried next to her last husband Théo, her father Louis-Alphonse Gassion and Marcelle Dupont, her daughter who died at the age of two from meningitis. (Metro: Père-Lachaise).
Edith's grave at Père Lachaise