Édith Piaf

📍72 rue de Belleville, 75020 Paris, France

“I was born in Belleville, the working-class neighbourhood in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, on the 19th of December 1915, in a building at 72 rue de Belleville — though there is a dispute about whether it was actually the street or the police station nearby, because my mother gave birth in the street and the gendarmes carried me inside. My father was a street acrobat and my mother a café singer, and my earliest years were spent in poverty that was absolute — I was partially blind for a time as a child, cared for by my grandmother who ran a brothel in Normandy. Belleville was the Paris of the poor, of the immigrants, of the people the grand boulevards were not built for, and its particular sadness and resilience ran through everything I ever sang. I returned to it in my voice even when I had left it far behind.”

Sources: Berteaut, S. Piaf (1969), Harper & Row; Burke, C. No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (2011), Bloomsbury; Lange, M. Edith Piaf (1981), Ariel Books