Édith Piaf - portrait français

"Édith Piaf - portrait français" has been shared to the blog from the French reading exercises section of the learning library where you can find a large selection of interactive texts to help you with your reading skills. This article also has audio for you to practice your French listening skills; you can find many more listening activities in the French listening practice section.


Édith Piaf was a French cabaret singer and international star. Read and listen to our bilingual article, then listen to a few of her classic songs.

Note: The tenses in this French article and its English translation don’t match! In French, we use the present and future tenses to describe historical stories like this to evoke a sense of immediacy, whereas in English, we commonly use the past tense – learn more about historical French tenses.

Click any word in the text to see its translation and related grammar lessons.

Classic Édith Piaf

Fill-in-the-blanks kwiz: La vie en rose, present tense and vocabulary.

Author info

Aurélie Drouard

Aurélie is our resident French Expert. She has created most of the wonderful content you see on the site and is usually the person answering your tricky help questions. She comes from a small village near Chartres in Central France, country of cereal fields and not much else. She left (in a hurry) to study English at the world-famous Sorbonne in Paris, before leaving France in 2007 to experience the “London lifestyle” - and never looked back! She's worked as a professional French teacher, translator and linguist in the UK since.  She loves to share her love of languages and is a self-professed cinema and literature geek!

Laura K Lawless

Laura is a French expert and Kwiziq's Head of Quality Control. Online educator since '99, Laura is passionate about language, travel, and cooking. She's American by birth and a permanent ex-pat by choice - freelancing made it possible for her to travel extensively and live in several countries before settling permanently in Guadeloupe. Laura is the author of Lawless French, Lawless Spanish, and other websites and books on French, Spanish, Italian, English, and vegetarianism. She spends most of her spare time reading, playing with food, and enjoying water sports.

Comments: 3

Laura est mon nom préferé... à cause de la musique, très belles chansons appélé Laura. our best brazilian singer, Altemar Dutra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yim85BkRJtg - another Laura, Peri Ribeiro - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AFGs3v5lRs... et merci, thank you for your posts, I've been learning a lot, j'apprends toujours,

Bonjour, Aurélie:
Merci beaucoup pour l'envoi de ce merveilleux article sur Edith Piaf. Bien que je trouve les faits de sa vie intéressante, je fus enchanté par les chansons que vous avez inclus. Wow, quelle voix! Elle me rappelle la chanteuse américaine Judy Garland. Petit corps, mais grand dans la voix. Je vais devoir chercher les mots pour ses chansons à découvrir pour moi-même les significations. Encore une fois, je vous remercie pour cela.

J'adore Edith Pilaf. Les chansons que vous avez inclus sont fantastique !
J'aime aussi Georges Brassens ( L'Auvergnat, Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux ), Céline Dion, Charles Trenet et Françoise Hardy (L' Amitié).