72 Rue de Belleville: Édith Piaf's Doorstep
Why is it significant?
Find number seventy-two, a plain grey building with a few stone steps leading up to the door. Nothing special about it... except the marble plaque beside the entrance.
Key Facts
| Place | 72 Rue de Belleville: Édith Piaf's Doorstep |
|---|---|
| Address | 72 Rue de Belleville, 75020 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.87290, 2.38290 |
| Part of Walk | Rebel Hill: Buttes-Chaumont, Belleville & the Secrets of Père-Lachaise in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Find number seventy-two, a plain grey building with a few stone steps leading up to the door. Nothing special about it... except the marble plaque beside the entrance. It says that on these very steps, on the 19th of December 1915, in the deepest poverty, Édith Piaf was born, the woman whose voice would later overwhelm the world.
It is a wonderful story. Her mother, a young street singer, went into labour in the middle of a freezing winter night. The legend says there was no time to reach a hospital, and the baby was delivered right here, under a street lamp, with the help of two police officers... or a passing stranger's cape, depending on who tells it. Her father was a street acrobat who was away at the front, in the middle of the First World War.
And here is the twist. Her birth certificate says something much less romantic. It records that Édith Giovanna Gassion was born in the Tenon hospital, a public hospital in the twentieth arrondissement, not far from here. But Paris has never let paperwork spoil a good story, and the plaque stays exactly where it is.
Even her first name was a sign of the times. She is said to have been named Édith after Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans in October 1915, a few weeks before Piaf was born. Her childhood was hard: she was raised partly by her grandmother in a brothel in Normandy and then followed her father on the road, singing on street corners for coins. A cabaret owner heard her in 1935 and gave her a stage name from Paris slang... la môme piaf, the little sparrow, because she was tiny, thin and fearless.
From these pavements she went on to sing La Vie en rose and Non, je ne regrette rien in the greatest concert halls in the world. And she never really left this corner of Paris: she is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery at the end of this walk. Now carry on down the Rue de Belleville, and turn left into a short street where every wall is a canvas.