Un passage to the afterlife in her image, very gently and discreetly… This is how the last days of Françoise Hardy are described this week in Paris Matchwhich looks in detail at the end of the life of the icon of French song, who died on June 11.
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Weakened by lymphoma and pharyngeal cancer, she had gradually become a shadow of herself: after losing twenty kilos in recent months, she could no longer walk alone and used a wheelchair to attend her appointments. you medical. A medical bed had even been installed at his home in recent days.
On Wednesday, June 5, she felt her strength gradually leaving her: “I’m very, very ill, I feel like I’m dying,” she replied to emails from friends who regularly asked for news.
The next day, she headed to the American hospital in Neuilly, “which she hates,” she said. Paris Match, where she underwent more than fifty x-rays and chemotherapy. An ordeal that she described in detail in the media, to call for a law on euthanasia. Around her, her relatives and friends: her niece Claire Dutronc and her former press secretary Marc Maréchal, who will never leave her side. Her son Thomas comes to join her at the weekend, even if she asks him not to change anything in his schedule and his planned concerts.
As for Jacques Dutronc, he came to see her a week earlier, during a trip to Paris. He understood that his days were now numbered, he wanted to share with her some last moments of intimacy and memories. “Every day, he went to Boulevard Suchet, probably to whisper nonsense in her ear, to make her laugh a little more,” writes the journalist Benjamin Locoge.
Dutronc refuses to go to the morgue
On Sunday, June 9, the singer wanted to return home, but her condition did not allow her to. Everyone understood, the vigil was organized with Claire and Marc, always at her side, until Tuesday, June 11 in the evening, when she passed away at 10:30 p.m., “calmed and rested,” according to her relatives.
Jacques is warned, as is Thomas, who is in the provinces for his tour. “You have to keep working, life has to go on,” she kept telling him. Father and son meet again two days later, but, still according to MatchJacques Dutronc refuses to go see Françoise in the morgue: too harsh, too violent…
But they are side by side to accompany him one last time to the Père-Lachaise crematorium in Paris. Before repatriating his ashes to Corsica, where the memories of happy days are: at the end of the 1960s, Françoise Hardy owned a house in Monticello and had introduced the country to her companion, who immediately fell under its spell…
Jacques Dutronc, who still lives there, bought a plot in the village cemetery, where the singer will rest for eternity. As for Thomas Dutronc, who also owns a house in a nearby village, he wanted to pay tribute to his mother through a new song, In your eyes, posted on Instagram on Wednesday: “In your eyes/ Always shine/ The same sky blue/ The same love the same fire/ So light/ Your atmosphere…”
Françoise Hardy undoubtedly experienced this death as a deliverance, she who could no longer bear the suffering and see her body deteriorate. Alongside music, his entire life was irrigated by an insatiable spiritual quest nourished by Buddhism, transcendental meditation, spiritualism, and the conviction that death was not the end of everything… “Death only concerns the physical body, she once explained in a daily interview La Libre Belgique. When a bond of true love unites two beings, this bond is indestructible since it concerns the soul, or, if you prefer the spirit, and these are eternal…”
