It is raining memories in March 2021, when we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Serge Gainsbourg. His children Natacha and Paul whom we never talk about, his passionate love affair with Jane Birkin, the endless list of women he has never rejected, his secret affair with Constance Meyer … Everyone has their own anecdote. . The photographer Xavier Martin tells how Serge Gainsbourg agreed to pose for him naked in his bath in Gainsbourg rue de Verneuil, (ed. Hervé Chopin). In the 2,304 pages of its impressive and daring Today's Boy's Sex Diary (P.O.L editions), Arthus Dreyfus (also) evokes the sexuality of Serge Gainsbourg and quotes Jane Birkin affirming that "Serge also liked boys ".
In his moving book, Bernard Pascuito has chosen for his part to tell The last life of Serge Gainsbourg (ed. of Cherche Midi, 304 p., € 18). It is Bambou, his last companion, usually very discreet, who signs the preface, confident how much she misses the father of her son Lucien, says Lulu. "Serge's absence weighs a thousand times more than any presence, and I can't help it ", she writes modestly.
Life was tough, Bambou had it before and after Serge. Caroline von Paulus, whose real name is, the great-niece of the defeated German Marshal in Stalingrad, she is just twenty-one years old and has just started a modeling career despite being sixty-seven, when she meets Serge one evening in April 1981 at the Elysée Matignon, the club in vogue at the time. She is adrift. Gainsbourg too, who has just left Jane Birkin eight months earlier. He was then 53 years old, thirty-two years older than Bambou. He's the one who will help her get out of the drugs where she fell.
A devastated childhood
Bambou is struggling to recover from a tragic childhood. Her mother fled hell in Communist China at age 13 to take refuge in Vietnam. A German legionary recognizes the child his mother is expecting before giving her five more, including her, the youngest. "Alas, the legionnaire von Paulus soon lost his head", summarizes Bernard Pascuito."He was hitting us with open cans, hanging my mom with ropes on the table, yelling that we weren't his children", confides the one who is not yet Bamboo.
The von Paulus family took refuge in a camp in Lot-et-Garonne. Bambou was only six months old when his father raped his older sister and stabbed his mother in the thigh, before being thrown in prison. For her and her siblings it will be Public Assistance. Bambou grew up without a father or mother as she would only see her once until she was thirteen.
It was Gainsbourg who nicknamed it Bambou "before you even know he's going to love her ", writes Bernard Pascuito. Bamboo, she, "love it right away! "I had known him, of course, for several years and I always told myself that I would like to have a dad like him …", she remembers. Which probably explains why she called Gainsbourg"dad".
Read also : Serge Gainsbourg "monstrously unfaithful": the confidences of his first companion, Elisabeth Levitzky