There is a moment on Jeff Buckley’s wonderful concert album Live A L’Olympia when, in the early bars of one particular number, a wave of applause bursts from the audience.
The American songsmith has just begun a loose version of Edith Piaf’s 1939 classic “Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin” (“I Don’t Know The End”). Loose in the sense that he only sings the Parisian chanteuse’s exact words when he reaches the chorus: “Oh, mon amour/A toi toujours/Dans tes grands yeux/Rien que nous deux” (“Oh, my love/Always yours/In your eyes/Just the two of us”). But the crowd picks up the melody immediately.
It is a joyful, spontaneous and touching moment, captured on a hot summer night in July 1995, which underlines again the connection between Paris and one of its most famous daughters. L’Olympia was the scene of some of Edith Piaf’s greatest shows, and hearing one of her songs reborn in the same place – even 32 years after her death (she died on October 11 1963) – has a clear impact on listeners who will never have seen her on stage.
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The link between Piaf and Paris will be emphasised again today – which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. For all the global fame she achieved – that distinctive potent voice, soused in 3am smokiness; ballads like “La Vie En Rose” and “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” – she was very much a figure whose tale was pinned to the French capital.
It was a tale tinged with drama and tragedy too – the death, aged two, of her daughter Marcelle, from meningitis and neglect; Piaf’s own abandonment by her mother, and unusual childhood experiences in her grandmother’s brothel in Normandy; accusations, not without justification, that her career rather thrived in the Paris occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944; her own horribly premature death at the age of 47.
But if you want to trace this story, it still shimmers in shadowy corners, faded places, cobbled streets and gilded quarters of Paris. And not least in the following locations…
Belleville
Piaf’s earliest moments are the stuff of legend. Tradition has it that she was born under a lamppost – to 20-year-old café singer Annetta Maillard – on Rue de Belleville, in the north-easterly Belleville district of the city. Rather more prosaically, her birth certificate states her point of arrival as the Hopital Tenon, a short walk away at 4 Rue de la Chine.
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Both places exist today. The hospital is Belleville’s main medical facility; a plaque on the wall above the door of 72 Rue de Belleville identifies the alleged birth site. But whatever the truth of Piaf’s (or “Edith Gassion”, to use the real name that she was given on December 19 1916) first hours, Belleville is a slice of Paris at its most intriguing. Spread across four arrondissements (mainly the 19th and 20th, but also the 10th and 11th), it was a working-class, immigrant neighbourhood in Piaf’s era. It retains this character and multi-cultural flavour in the 21st century – if with more of a bohemian edge than a century ago.
Montmartre
Paris's most celebrated, yet seediest, hill was always a neat fit with "The Little Sparrow" and her nighttime music. By 14, she was haunting the district's narrow lanes as a street singer, working alongside her best friend Simone "Momone" Berteaut. The pair earned enough to take a room at the Grand Hotel de Clermont, at 18 Rue Veron on Montmartre's lower slopes – a dingy, make-do bolthole where the two lived in cramped conditions for four years. Remarkably, it is still there (0033 1 4606 4099; grandhoteldeclermont.com), scarcely grand, barely more glamorous, and no bigger, than it was in the late Twenties – but an evocative slice of the area's past nonetheless. Double rooms cost from £39 a night.
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Piaf would have an enduring relationship with Montmartre. By the late Thirties, she would be a regular performer at Au Lapin Agile, a romantic bunker of a cabaret club at 22 Rue des Saules, where her soaring, expressive vocals filled out the ill-lit interior. This, too, still clings to the Parisian map (0033 1 4606 8587; au-lapin-agile.com), and stages torch-song performances – entry €28 – where you can almost hear the murmur of ghosts.
Pigalle
The district at Montmartre's foot was another Piaf enclave. She sang some of her first shows at a club called Juan-Les-Pins on Rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, taking tentative steps towards stardom. The club is long gone, but the street – which runs south from Place Pigalle, with its ornate art nouveau metro station, to Saint-Lazare and the striking Eglise de la Trinité – has retained plenty of its scrappy soul, with its scuffed bars and brasseries.
Wartime Paris
Piaf adopted her stage name in 1936 as her profile grew, but her career really bloomed as Paris fell under the boot of Hitler's troops. That the chanteuse thrived in this dark epoch still casts something of a shadow across her image. She was even questioned as a “collaboratrice” once France had shaken off its foe, before the accusations were dropped.
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The venues that she played – the brothels of a city at war – have long vanished. Each of them disappeared when prostitution was outlawed in France in 1946. Indeed, you will find no evidence that Le Sphinx ever revelled in a sleazy version of Ancient Egypt at 31 Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, in the then-scruffy confines of Montparnasse – the address is now home to a bank. Equally, gilded bordello Le Chabanais, a hang-out for high-ranking German officers, has long been expunged from its genteel street close to the Louvre – the building at 12 Rue Chabanais now holds an office. Nor can you detect any echoes in the plush apartment that Piaf bought with her earnings in a brighter part of town – a chic pad at number four on what was then Rue de Villejust, and is now Rue Paul-Valery. At the time, the apartment stood above another chi-chi brothel-club, L'Etoile de Kléber. Rue Paul-Valery, just south of the Arc de Triomphe, now has a rather more genteel ambience.
L'Olympia
Piaf enjoyed her finest hours on the Paris boards at this iconic concert hall – playing a series of shows between 1955 and 1962 which were committed to vinyl, helping to seal her legacy. Very much still in operation, and a cultural cornerstone of Paris, L'Olympia (0033 892 683 368; en.olympiahall.com) sits at 28 Boulevard des Capucines, in the elegant 9th arrondissement – a short walk from the grand Palais Garnier, the French capital's main opera house. It hosts gigs and performances on most evenings of the week.
Musée Edith Piaf
The Little Sparrow is saluted on the edge of Belleville. The Musée Edith Piaf, at 5 Rue Crespin du Gast (0033 1 4355 5272; parisinfo.com), contains the private collection of one Bernard Marchois, a Piaf aficionado whose two-room tribute contains a range of her personal effects: dresses, shoes, gold discs and photos. Entry is free, but by appointment.
Pere-Lachaise Cemetery
Though she died far from home – in her villa at Grasse, in Provence – Piaf is buried little more than a mile from where she was born, in the 20th arrondissement landmark that is the Cimetiere Pere-Lachaise (0033 1 5525 8210; pere-lachaise.com). Other "residents" of this feted Paris cemetery include – of course – Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, although her grave is not privy to the hubbub which afflicts The Doors singer's resting place. Piaf lies in a plot which reads "Famille Gassion-Piaf" – alongside her infant daughter, her father and her second husband Theo Sarapo. The tomb is found in the south-east corner of the cemetery, on Transversale 3 – between Avenue Circulaire and Avenue Pacthod.
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