The public knew exactly where to gather when they heard Jane Birkin had died. On July 16, several dozen admirers spontaneously gathered at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil, in Paris's 7th arrondissement. They laid flowers and candles, graffitied "Merci Jane," "Jane 4 ever," and pasted drawings and photos on the walls in front of the house where the singer and actress shared Serge Gainsbourg's life for almost a decade. The new graffiti was superimposed on those dedicated to the singer, who died in 1991. For a long time, this street art facade was the only visible piece of this legendary family.
Starting on September 20, visitors will be able to go through the gates and visit the private home. Across the street, at number 14, they will then be able to visit the museum and its trail, retracing the artist's life through 450 objects, a bookshop and a piano-bar café named Le Gainsbarre.
This is how their daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg wanted it. In the middle of August, her face was visibly etched with grief. A few days earlier, the actress had carried her mother's coffin into the church of Saint-Roch (in Paris's 1st arrondissement) during a ceremony attended by family and friends, including Catherine Deneuve, Benjamin Biolay and Alain Souchon, and celebrities like Brigitte Macron. She was now "orphaned," she said, her voice full of tears, during her speech at the funeral mass.
Birkin's death echoed the sudden death of her father when she was 19. At the time, she experienced the grief of his fans as an invasion of her privacy. "I put on a brave face and smiled, but it was very violent. I didn't want to hear any of their memories, and I wanted to be left alone," she explained, both of her hands clutching a cup of tea. Nowadays, she "listens" and "receives." "I see all the good my mother did and I want to hear about it," she said, her unassuming figure dressed entirely in black.
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The summer of 2023 should have been a joyous one. It marked the culmination of an adventure spanning almost 30 years. This Maison Gainsbourg project was Charlotte's own vision. She, the best-known child of Serge Gainsbourg, who had three others, was the one who always carried it. Although the singer himself started publicly exhibiting his family life to the world at the turn of the 1970s, he had previously been much more discreet.
Natacha and Paul, the eldest children he had in the 1960s with his second wife Françoise-Antoinette Pancrazzi, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, did not grow up on Rue de Verneuil. They barely knew their father, who met Birkin in the summer of 1968, and have always shunned the limelight. The fourth, Lulu, son of Bambou, his last companion, was just five years old when his father died.
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