Some eighty thousand Parisians of all classes are reckoned to have walked past the coffin of Edith Piaf yesterday afternoon and today, as she lay in state in the studio of her flat in the Boulevard Lannes.
It was originally intended only to admit the public today, but mourners began to assemble at two yesterday afternoon, so that the flat was opened to the public at five.
At seven, when the police tried to close it, there was still a waiting queue of 500, which was only with difficulty persuaded to disperse. People living in the same block of flats had great difficulty in reaching their homes.
Today the police had repeatedly to send for reinforcements and more barriers to contain the crowds. The crowds got out of hand on several occasions and the police were not always edifying.
Once inside the flat, the mourners were kept moving past the coffin at the rate of about a hundred a minute. The singer lay in the coffin with a glass lid in the black dress she wore on the stage. The piano to which she sang when at home was open.
Many mourners brought wreaths or bunches of flowers. One wreath came from soldiers in the Foreign Legion The majority of mourners were women.
The singer is to be buried on Monday at the Père Lachaise cemetery without a full Roman Catholic funeral service, since she had remarried by the Greek Orthodox rite after a divorce. The Archbishopric of Paris has, however, specially delegated the chaplain of the Catholic Legion of the Theatre to say prayers by her graveside.
The death on the same day of Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau, friends though they came from different origins and appealed to different publics, has made a deep impression in France, but especially in Paris, where "La Mome Piaf" [The Little Sparrow] was accepted as the voice of popular emotion.
Dr Lewis resigns Chair.
Dr C. S. Lewis, who has been professor of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge University since 1954, has resigned because of recurring ill health. He resigns both his Chair and his honorary fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Dr Lewis is well known as a Christian apologist. His published works include the "Screwtape Letters", "The Problem of Pain" and "Mere Christianity". Dr Lewis, who is 64, married an American poetess, Mrs Joy Gresham, in 1958.
[Lewis died a month after this report.]
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