The man who shares a house with Edith Piaf

Yesterday I met a man who knew Edith Piaf. Bernard Marchois, who runs the Edith Piaf museum tucked down a sidestreet in Menilmontant, first saw her perform when he was 16. Today, nearly 40 years after her death, his life is utterly entwined with that of the dead singer. The former teddy boy is a tall, elderly, elegant gentleman with a deep tan and a very slight stoop, courteous and world-weary, who welcomes Piaf’s disciples to the two rooms in Menilmontant that comprise the extraordinary Edith Piaf Museum: a place so intimate that it feels as if it’s her home.
In fact, it’s his home, although he told me that once, for a short while, in 1933, it was also hers. Four flights up, the two rooms packed with Piaf’s worldly goods are part of his flat. You have to make a private appointment to visit; Marchois speaks personally to each would-be worshipper at the Piaf shrine; allocates them a time and gives them the door codes necessary to gain entrance to the building.
Inside, every inch of the two small rooms is pervaded by Piaf’s forcible presence. A life-sized lack-and-white cut-out of her rather spookily dominates the room despite her tiny size; I’m 5’5” and the top of her head was level with my bra. But, as a recorded version of La Vie En Rose drifts shamelessly through the air, it is obvious why the Little Sparrow has such a hold on French hearts, and those of other romantics, wherever they might be born.
The rooms are full of paintings, photographs and hand-written tributes, but the most fascinating items are the things she might have worn, touched, or loved. Her tiny shoes are there, as are two of the black dresses she famously wore when she performed – both enveloped in plastic, and once tucked behind a door - and the accompanying crucifixes. There’s the limited edition perfume La Mome; her great love Marcel Cerdan’s boxing gloves; an enormous plush bear given to her by last husband Theo, and incongruously, a housecoat in rich, warm red velvet. But then, Marchois says that, in person, she was different from how this icon of heartbreak and defiant survival appeared when she sang: in life, he says, she was funny, and loved to laugh.
She certainly knew how to inspire love. Marchois has written two books about her and devoted his life to tending her flame and welcoming her devotees to his apartment. You can almost feel Piaf in the room, and if you were to believe in ghosts, you might feel hers was hovering, just about to make an entrance.