Inside Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s Storied Home

livemint.com:

On March 2, 1991, Serge Gainsbourg went to sleep in his bed on the second floor of his house at 5 bis rue de Verneuil in Paris and never woke up. A second heart attack killed him at age 62. For all of France, his death was both shocking and unsurprising.

Who couldn’t recite from memory at least some of the chiseled lyrics—at times playful, at times caustic, often outrageous—he’d written for himself and a string of women he’d worked with and slept with over the years? Gainsbourg bestrode the French cultural landscape like a broken-down colossus. “He was our Apollinaire, our Baudelaire," wrote French president François Mitterand. Gainsbourg’s body was discovered the following afternoon by the model and actress Bambou—his last companion, who no longer lived with him.

Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte heard the news on TV and rushed over to the house. “He was dead, cold, and no one had touched him—I don’t think Bambou dared," Charlotte remembers. “I didn’t even ask myself any questions, I just lay down next to him, side by side, like we were two small animals.

A more sensible person might have said, No, that’s just not done. But I was 19 and no one could tell me what to do. He was my father." Charlotte Gainsbourg, 52, said she started dreaming about opening her childhood home to the public soon after her father’s death.

It’s taken more than three decades of false starts, changes of heart and high melodrama to make it happen. The first visitors to 5 bis will arrive September 20 in groups of 10 at half-hour intervals. Tickets for the first 30,000 places sold out shortly after the opening date was announced.