There has been much interest in France in an auction of memorabilia relating to Belgian-born singer Jacques Brel, 30 years after his death at the age of 49
A SHORT, stocky Frenchman wandered among the glass showcases at Sotheby's, across the street from the Élysée Palace yesterday.
He was Philippe Lamarche (49), a bus driver.
"Could I just touch the armrest?" Lamarche asked an employee of the auction house, nodding at two black leather chairs cordoned off with a rope.
Like the other 94 lots in yesterday's auction, the armchairs belonged to Jacques Brel.
Lamarche said he felt a little closer to his idol, "the greatest singer of all time", for having touched the scratched armrest.
He had set aside €400 for the auction. But the worn Montblanc pen he coveted was expected to fetch up to €1,500. At best, Lamarche said, he hoped to purchase a photograph.
Thirty years ago today, Lamarche learned of Brel's death on the radio.
"I got on my motor scooter and went to the Franco-Muslim hospital in Bobigny, where he died," Lamarche recalled. "I stood outside and shed a tear."
Though Belgian by birth, Brel is often mistakenly called French, for example on the poster from his triumphal December 1965 concert at Carnegie Hall in New York.
The musical revue, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, comprising 25 Brel classics translated into English, has played intermittently around the world for 40 years.
Seasons in the Sun, Terry Jacks's version of Brel's song about a dying man's farewells, was a worldwide pop hit in 1974.
Rod McKuen's If You Go Away, based on Brel's Ne me quitte pas, is doubtless Brel's best-known song. It was written for Suzanne Gabriello, a singer with whom he had an affair from 1955 until 1961.
Brel's CDs still sell 200,000 copies a year in France. Almost 3,000 people visited the Sotheby's pre-auction exhibition.
Brel's songs cover the range of human emotion, from hilarity to grief, from jealousy to resignation.
Some of his best songs are about male friendship (Jo-Jo, Jef).
His J'arrive, the narrative of a dying man about to join his maker, has all the majesty of a Hollywood film score, infused with nostalgia for the life he is leaving: "How much I would have liked to drag my bones into the sun, just one more time . . ."
Brel feared ageing more than death. "Dying, what a joke," he sang. "But growing old . . ."
First published in 1984, Olivier Todd's Jacques Brel: a Life has sold 300,000 copies and has been reissued, along with many of Brel's records, for the 30th anniversary of his death.
"If the word genius has a meaning, he was a genius," Todd says. "He was unique. He wrote his texts. He composed his songs, without knowing how to read music."
And Brel was a spectacular performer. On stage, he poured sweat, screwed up his face and became the characters he sang about.
"Brel was a portraitist and a landscape artist," Todd continues. His portrait songs include Mathilde and Marieke.
Brussels, Amsterdam and Les Marquises are exquisite landscapes set to music.
But if there is one theme Brel excelled at, it was l'amour.
He met Thérèse Michielsen (known as Miche) in a Catholic youth group and married her in 1950, when he was 21 and she was 23.
Miche was his long-suffering anchor, the mother of his three daughters.
Though he lived with several women for periods of up to a decade, he never divorced her.
Brel had a talent for convincing every woman he was involved with that she was the woman of his life, the only one who counted.
"I never really understood women," he once admitted. "I think I missed out on something important, through laziness or a sense of propriety. Women always fall short of the love you dream of."
Todd is indulgent towards Brel's multiple loves, one of whom still chooses to remain secret.
"There were only four or five who really counted," he says. "For a man in Paris, four or five women in 25 years isn't that many."
Throughout the 1960s, Brel lived with Sylvie Rivet, who had been a press attachée with his record company, Philips. The items auctioned at Sotheby's came from their home on the Côte d'Azur.
Rivet died childless, and her nieces and nephews put the guitars, manuscripts and other belongings up for sale against the wishes of Brel's daughter, France.
In 1971, Brel met Maddly Bamy, a young actor from Guadeloupe, on a film set. She stayed with him until his death seven years later. Brel had given up music to become a film actor and director, then learned to sail and pilot an aircraft .
He and Bamy set off into the sunset in 1973, but he was diagnosed with lung cancer when they reached the Canary Islands.
The cigarettes he had chainsmoked would kill Brel at the age of 49.
He spent the last two years of his life with Bamy in the Marquesas archipelago, in the South Pacific.
Brel is buried there, at Atuona, beside the painter Paul Gauguin.
