Brel

A tale of romance, song, age, despair and death comes to us from Alicante in Spain, where it is reported that the woman who inspired Jacques Brel's wonderful song "Madeleine" has taken her own life at the age of 69. The woman -- who the papers name coyly only as Madeleine Z. -- took a cocktail of drugs after seeking the help of a right-to-die group. She had been suffering from a terrible motor neurone disease. In the weeks before her death she befriended a journalist at El Pais and told her of her youth in Paris. After narrowly escaping deportation in the war (she was half-Jewish) she became an habituee of the jazz-club scene. This was where she met Brel. She worked as a model but also sang -- and she says she performed with Brel when he went to hospitals and prisons. She told El Pais that one day she stood Brel up for a date, and this inspired the classic 1962 song. With its opening words "Ce soir j'attends Madeline, j'ai apporte du lilas," the song is about waiting for a girl who never comes. It is Brel at his utterly brilliant best. Madeleine Z. moved to Spain in the mid 1960s, and would have been long forgotten but for the fact that her plight reawakened debate there over euthanasia. The kicker to the story is that I rang up the Jacques Brel Foundation in Brussels to find out more, and they told me they had never heard of this Madeleine Z. Be careful, I was told. We have lost count of the number of people who claim to be this or that person in Brel's songs. Many of them are fantasists.