Serge Gainsbourg’s house-museum opened in Paris

Yesterday, September 20, on Rue Verneuil in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, a house-museum of the singer, composer, poet Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991), which was created by his daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, opened. Thirty-two years after her father’s death, she gave the house to his fans, who for many years had left their declarations of love on the wall in front of the locked gate. Kommersant’s correspondent in France talks about the museum Alexey Tarkhanov.

Serge Gainsbourg’s house is finally open. However, for those who haven’t taken care since spring, it’s still closed. This is not a museum, but a house, a city apartment one hundred and thirty meters away, in the rooms of which two people can hardly separate. No more than ten visitors per session. Wait until the new year for new tickets – and only if you’re in a hurry.

In the apartment that Gainsbourg bought in 1968, the Englishwoman Andre Higgins created for him an extremely theatrical interior in the colors of early Taganka: walls covered in black, white doors and trim, black and white squares on the floor. Nowadays they love meaningless white, Serge Gainsbourg felt great in black. This makes the space seem even smaller, the rooms even cramped. Not a studio, not a memorial, but an apartment in which they lived: its rooms are densely, but at the same time surprisingly neatly filled with furniture and various things valuable to the owners.

The museum’s collection consists of 25 thousand items, but there are almost no “treasures”. Man with the Head of a Cabbage by Claude Lalanne, a sculpture with which Gainsbourg felt a kinship. The manuscript of Rouget de Lisle’s La Marseillaise, which Gainsbourg bought after covering the national anthem to a reggae tune. The rest is autographs, covers, wine bills, photographs, handwritings of songs, records and CDs.

A large portrait of Brigitte Bardot, for whom this house was built, stands next to the piano – behind him and for her the song “Je t’aime – Moi non plus” was written, which was immediately transferred to Jane Birkin. Current visitors have the opportunity to visit not only the living room, where friends and journalists were received, but also go up to the second floor. There was a children’s room with a low ceiling, Jane Birkin’s bedroom, which Gainsbourg turned into a memorial, his office – rather a corner with a high chair, books and a typewriter on the table. And the second bedroom in which he died on March 2, 1991, lying on his left side, having a heart attack in his sleep. You can look into the tiny kitchen, where if you can freely prepare anything, it’s black, black coffee.

Hardly, falling asleep forever, Serge Gainsbourg thought that he was dying in his museum. It was a home that he treated as home and always returned to. Sometimes he was on the arm of the police, with whom he continued the evening, begging for souvenirs – police badges and even handcuffs are still in his collection.

The amazing feeling of a time capsule was supported by the fact that you can’t just get there whenever you want. You can only book a ticket, like on a plane to the past. And only if there are still places left. You will be offered, however, as a consolation to go to the nearby exhibition hall. There is now an exhibition of one song “Je t’aime – Moi non plus”, and the store sells CDs, posters, and books. And also the clothes Gainsbourg loved, Lee Cooper and Repetto, here everyone will understand whether he can fit into the hero’s jeans and his slippers.

Nearby there is a bar called the “Gans-bar”, where you can eat a healthy sandwich during the day and drink hard in the evening in memory of the former owners of the house: Gainsbourg himself and Jane Birkin, who this year – by all accounts, offensive to all her subsequent men — returned to her Serge in heaven.

But the main thing is not the bar or the exhibition, but the house itself, in which the children and wives did not dare to touch a single thing, not even the cigarette butt in the ashtray. It seems that the family was afraid of this black-black mausoleum and its ghosts. About this, Charlotte Gainsbourg recorded an excursion-confession-declaration of love, which is given to the lucky ones along with headphones before the visit. She had to negotiate with family and friends, buy premises in the neighborhood, and look for money: most of the €6 million was given by private individuals, including Saint Laurent, 800 thousand were allocated by the Ile-de-France region, 45 thousand by the National Center for Music. Work with the museum team followed – it must have been very painful, because Charlotte protected herself for a long time, trying not to listen to her father’s songs, not to see him in the movies and not to read his biographies, coming to his house only in very rare, special moments. Jane Birkin’s death on July 16 was not a reason to postpone the opening. Charlotte seemed to be in a hurry. Giving this house to museum workers and visitors meant completing another stage of the already too long farewell to my father.

She ended up with a strange museum that is impossible to describe and impossible to preserve either in memory or in time, no matter how many little things remain in their original places. Charlotte herself says that the most painful thing for her is to see the mark of her father’s buttocks on the dented sofa. A much stronger feeling than when she sees the slab in the Montparnasse cemetery, where she does not like to go.

Well, for those who will not soon be visiting Gainsbourg, you can look at the mother and daughter who came to the museum in the film “Jane through the Eyes of Charlotte” to get a complete picture of him. The women there talk about the smell that remained in the house for thirty years. I no longer felt it, he was the first thing that disappeared.