The singer, who died at the age of 80, had expressed the wish to be “cremated in privacy and without religious ceremony” in Corsica, at Monticello, according to Paris Match.
Close friends or simple admirers are invited to come and say goodbye this Thursday, June 20 at the Père-Lachaise cemetery to Françoise Hardy, who died at the age of 80. The singer of “So Many Beautiful Things” had expressed the wish to be “cremated in privacy and without religious ceremony” in Corsica, according to the weekly Paris Match. More precisely in Monticello, where Jacques Dutronc lives and where she also owned a house.
No request for burial of ashes in the cemetery had been made at the start of the week, Monticello town hall said when questioned by AFP. There remains the option of scattering the ashes in nature or placing the funeral urn on a grave on private property.
3 p.m. in the Coupole du Père-Lachaise room
“We will meet in the Dome room of the crematorium of the Père-Lachaise cemetery (…) from 3 p.m.,” wrote in the Figaro notebook Jacques Dutronc, her husband from whom she was separated but not divorced since years and their son Thomas.
Also a musician, it was he who announced the death of the yéyé idol, interpreter of hits like “All the boys and girls” or “Comment te dire adieu”, subsequently covered in English. Under a photo of him and his mother, Thomas Dutronc wrote a sober “Mom is gone” on the evening of June 11 on social networks.
Two days later, he returned to the stage during a poignant concert in Pas-de-Calais. “In England, we say ‘elephant in the room’ (the huge subject we avoid talking about, Editor’s note). (…) We cannot translate into French but, for me, my ‘elephant in the room’ , it’s my mother’s departure to other skies,” he said modestly, in front of an emotional audience.
Ill since 2004
An emblematic figure of the sixties with an evanescent voice, Françoise Hardy had been waging a battle against illness for many years. Cancer appeared in his life in 2004, taking several forms and causing him an ordeal.
The artist thus admitted to Paris Match in 2023 that she wanted to “leave soon and quickly, without too many challenges, such as the impossibility of breathing”.
She spoke out for the right to die with dignity and wrote a letter to this effect published at the end of 2023 in La Tribune Dimanche.
The artist, with his assumed melancholy, conquered the Anglo-Saxon public in the 1960s, catching the eye of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. She was also the only Frenchwoman in the ranking of the 200 best singers of all time by the American magazine Rolling Stone in 2023.
