Le Musée d'Edith Piaf

Rue Crespin
PHOTOGRAPH BY Photographer Name

"Come on, Milord", I'm taking you to Edith Piaf's little apartment.

Transformed into a Museum by the association "Les Amis D’Edith Piaf". Located at 5 rue Crespin Du Gast, in a popular district of the 11th arrondissement of Paris. This little-known and discreet museum is a place where Edith Piaf lived some time before her ascent

Music ..We are greeted with music on the theme of "La Vie En Rose", or "Mon Dieu" and many other songs.

This small two-room apartment of great simplicity, just like Piaf herself, is a place full of many memories, stories and loves of the performer.

She preciously kept each gift and souvenir intended for her, it was one of her character traits, "throw nothing away, keep everything", the objects of this museum are therefore in abundance.

Like this collection of porcelain plates in white and baby blue hues. Hanging on the living room wall, presents from her friends.

Edith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan
PHOTOGRAPH BY Marie Noelle Benifla

We also discover photos and memories of a happy and fleeting past with Marcel Cerdan. The latter's boxing gloves rest on a pedestal table next to a photo of him, pausing before a fight.

Image Caption
PHOTOGRAPH BY Marie Noelle Benifla

One of the famous little black dresses that the singer wore during her concerts is exhibited on a wooden mannequin. She stubbornly refused to change the style and color as she wanted the audience not to be distracted from her presence and performance.

The cross and the medal from which she never parted, especially before a performance, were memories of childhood, today adorn a wooden model.

On the walls of this apartment are hung paintings and drawings from Charles Kiffer

Painter and friend of Edith Piaf. Also are posters that are side by side with handwritten letters sent by Edith to her relatives and multiple lovers.

This apartment, full of stories and emotions, takes us into the private realm of the singer

We can almost feel her presence there.

A life-size reproduction of Edith in cardboard shows us how small she was: 1 meter 47, roughly 4 ft 9 in, as well as her stage shoes, a child’s size so to speak…

How could this woman, so frail, so thin, have a resonance, a voice so powerful, universally known, and so touching ..? ... The explanation may lie in her past

Edith Piaf, of her birth name Édith Giovanna Gassion, was born on December 19, 1915 in Paris, into a family of acrobats, street singers, where poverty, the abandonment of her parents, and her maternal grandmother all mingle.

For a while, little Edith discovers happiness in a loving home with her paternal grandmother "Maman Tine 'patron of a brothel in Bernay in Normandy.

Reaching blindness, little Edith visits several doctors, after weeks of treatment and a pilgrimage to the tomb of Thérèse of the Child Jesus in Lisieux, the little girl recovers her sight,

Following this event, she will keep a medal for little Sainte Thérèse all her life. In 1922 her father took her back with him, heading to the capital, at 7 years old. At fifteen, she became a kid on the streets of Paris, without parental ties, only singing to earn a living.

Her only child, Marcelle, was born in 1933, which she lost following a probable meningitis in 1935. That same year Édith Gassion was discovered by Louis Leplée, manager of a cabaret near the Champs Élysées

He found her a stage name "La môme Piaf" in reference to her frail silhouette of a child, to that of a sparrow, and it was under this name that she began her career, she settled in the apartment on rue Crespin-du-Gast in 1933, a mark of its social development, it moved many times, notably to the Hôtel Particulier on rue Leconte-De-Lisle in the 1940s

Edith Piaf died on October 10, 1963 at the age of 47, she rests in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, with her father and daughter Marcelle…

Édith Piaf sur les genoux de Louis Leplée
PHOTOGRAPH BY Marie Noelle Benifla

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Marie Noelle Benifla