Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau died on the same day. Cocteau, chivalrous at the last, obeyed the rule of ladies first. 'Ah, la Piaf est morte,' he said on the morning of October 11 1963. 'Je peux mourir aussi.' [Ah, Piaf's dead. I can die too.'] And then he promptly died of a heart attack. Or so legend has it.

But in these matters, legend is all-important, while what actually happened concerns only those with no imagination or soul. No doubt this is what was going through the mind of Piaf's second husband and final lover, the actor Theo Sarapo, when he put her corpse in his car and headed for Paris shortly after she died of cancer. He had to race against time to make it look as if the great French singer had died in her Paris apartment, because that is what her fans would have expected of her - faithful to no man, but ever faithful to Paris."