House museums #2: Musée Édith Piaf, Paris

Dedicated to the life of the beloved quintessential French singer, this makes for an unusual museum visit. For a start, it is just two rooms in an apartment in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, not far from Rue de Belleville, where — legend has it — the star was born on the doorstep of number 72.

You need to contact the museum to arrange a visit; a code will be sent to gain access to the entrance hall, where residents returning from the shops will direct you to the fourth floor. You ring the doorbell of the apartment and Bernard Marchois lets you inside.

Marchois, a friend of Piaf’s and the curator, founded the museum four years after her death in 1963, aged just 47. Her life oozed theatricality on and offstage but he talks of her with an intimacy few professional guides can offer.

“She was very kind,” he says. “Funny, approachable, not at all big-headed . . . very human.”

Piaf lived here before she became one of the greats of French chanson, in the league of Maurice Chevalier, Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. “She was 18, still singing in the streets, not yet in the cabaret,” he says.

Her songs — on a playlist as you tour the museum — reflect her tumultuous love affairs and the hardships of her life. Abandoned at birth and raised by her grandmother in a brothel, she knew poverty, alcoholism and drug addiction, and survived several car crashes.

The museum’s two small rooms bring to mind a doll’s house and are filled with Piaf’s belongings, many donated by her friends and her second husband Théo Sarapo. Among them are her shoes (size 34), a crocodile-skin Hermès handbag and her made-to-measure black performance dresses.

“She wanted to look sombre and, with her kind of songs, it was not a question of wearing feathers and sequins,” Marchois explains. The simple black style allowed the expressiveness of her hands and face to come to the fore, visible in photographs and a small carved bust on display.

Piaf’s 18 gold discs line the walls. A giant teddy bear was a gift from Sarapo. Opposite the bear are a pair of boxing gloves that belonged to her great love Marcel Cerdan, the former middleweight champion who died in a plane crash on his way to New York to join her in 1949.

“A favourite memory,” Marchois says, “is the first time I saw Piaf perform. I’d seen her before, so I knew she wasn’t tall, but when she arrived on stage, she was so much taller.”

At 1.47 metres, La Môme Piaf (the Little Sparrow) was physically diminutive, but her presence always loomed large. Her sonorous voice has resounded down the decades to delight new fans today.

museeedithpiaf.fr

Cartography by Liz Faunce Map based on OpenStreetMap data

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