“We were advised to call the morgue”: this night of anguish after the breakup between Véronique Sanson and Michel Berger

A real love at first sight that ended in a sudden breakup… In 1967, it was at the age of 18 that Véronique Sanson met Michel Berger. Having the same passion, the two artists quickly fell in love, before separating. In March 1972, the singer has indeed left the one who was then in a relationship with France Gall, to live a love story with Stephen Stills. Thursday, November 10, in the columns of Gala, his older sister, Violaine, remembered: “I was with Michel and his sister Francka, in the apartment he had with Vero in Paris, rue de Prony. We spent a night calling the hospitals. Then the police stations. At the end, we were advised to call the morgue. I was angry with her for leaving like that.“Revealing to have had less news then, Violaine confided:”She first lived in Colorado, with an eight-hour shift, then in California, with a nine-hour shift. We forgot, but at the time, there was no WhatsApp, no networks, no emails.“

Regretting the way she had acted, it is in the columns of L’Obs that the interpreter of my funny life confided on Tuesday, February 3, 2015: “I didn’t feel guilty for leaving, but for having had the cowardice not to warn Michel. In my defense, I was young, I must have been 20 or 21 years old. So not guilty, but a coward. Between the two, there is a sacred nuance. I was a coward and I blamed myself so much.In conclusion, she added:The regrets came later, when I told myself that I should have kept both. I would have been the happiest of women.“In the biography France Gall: loves, songs and tears, the producer Bernard Saint-Paul had assured:”Contrary to what she was able to declare, Véronique Sanson did not leave Michel by telling him that she was going to buy cigarettes. It was at the end of autumn 1972, we had gone skiing in La Plagne, with Michel and Véro, and around 9 p.m., we arrived in Paris and they dropped me off at my place, in Boulogne.“He added:”At 3 o’clock in the morning, Véro called me: ‘I’m hungry, come join me at L’Hôtel, rue des Beaux-Arts.’ I went there and there she was in bed with Stephen Stills. They got dressed and we went to eat at the Sherwood, a restaurant open all night, located boulevard des Capucines, between the Olympia and the Opera.“

Véronique Sanson: “Songs were our way of communicating”

Bernard Saint-Paul explained that the singer had told him that Stephen Stills wanted her to leave France to go live in the United States with him. “The next day, Michel called me at 8 am to find out if I had heard from Véronique. He was very worried, but I didn’t say anything to protect him and I went to join him in rue de Prony, where he was to settle down with her and I spent the whole day trying to distract him… He never forgave me this silence“, he had let it be known. Despite their separation, Véronique Sanson had confided in August 2021 that she had written her songs for Michel Berger. Current wifeshe said:Songs were our way of communicating. He wrote me something, I knew it was for me, and I replied. At the time, laptops did not exist! And we never sent each other letters.“