Serge Gainsbourg was a certain kind of Englishman’s worst nightmare of a Frenchman: rude, alcoholic and extravagantly addicted to cigarettes (five packs of unfiltered Gitanes a day . . . five! . . . unfiltered!). This, of course, is the secret of the great man’s charm. To anybody who has ever regretted being born on the pallid and puritanical side of the Channel, he offers an exotic vision of what might have been: semi-permanent drunkenness, a bohemian contempt for all shirt buttons above the navel, a career of chaotic offence-giving rewarded with public adulation.
Gainsbourg’s house, in the 7th arrondissement — which he lived in from 1969 until his death at the age of 62 in 1991, and which has been untouched since then —
