The muse who inspired one of Jacques Brel's most famous songs was yesterday at the centre of a euthanasia controversy after her son asked a judge to investigate those who helped her to commit suicide in Spain. Madeleine Zeffa Biver, the orphan child of a communist father and a Jewish mother killed in occupied Paris during the second world war, led a colourful existence that ended when she took her life last Friday.
A youthful bohemian and fixture of Paris nightlife in the 1950s, she was the inspiration for Brel's love song Madeleine, and a friend to singer-songwriters such as Georges Brassens.
Before her death, the former underwear model, restaurateur and teenage wife of a French mercenary wrote a letter to El País newspaper in which she asked to be allowed to "die with dignity". "Please give me a glass of water, wine or whiskey," the wheelchair-user said from her beachside home in Alicante, eastern Spain. "I want to die with my head held high, blowing kisses to those who have helped me with their love and words. This is not a crime. It is not a murder."
However, it is illegal to assist a suicide in Roman Catholic Spain. Those found guilty face jail terms of up to 10 years.
A judge in Alicante was yesterday investigating 69-year-old Madeleine's death after her son, Domingo Biver, asked for those who helped or encouraged her to die to be tracked down and prosecuted. "When she was depressed she would talk about suicide, but a couple of days later she would forget about it," he said. "I think they encouraged her to die."
Spain's Right to a Dignified Death group sent two people to watch her die, but claimed yesterday that there was nothing criminal about offering moral support to someone who wished to kill themselves. "It is not illegal," the group's chairman, Fernando Marín, said. The group publishes booklets containing advice on how to commit suicide.
'Overcooked spaghetti'
She had been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, for five years. The fatal motor neuron disorder left her, in her words, with "a body like an overcooked piece of spaghetti". The condition imposed by her illness contrasted with an exotic, adventurous life during the previous 60 years.
Orphaned during the war, her earliest memories were of seeing her parents' dead bodies. Her communist father had worked as a biologist at the botanical gardens in Paris, while her mother was a French Jew. She recalled fleeing, as a six-year-old, from a train which she later believed was taking her to Germany, possibly to an extermination camp. "I was never sure if it was for being a Jew or a communist," she said later. She escaped by hiding under a bench and then clinging to the trouser leg of a man, who looked after her in a border town.
It took family and friends two years to find her, and she was finally returned to an aunt in 1946. Later she was sent to boarding school, which she escaped from at the age of 15 to marry a French mercenary. Four years later she divorced him, alleging mistreatment, but lost custody of their two children.
She lived off modelling work and became a fixture in the smoke-filled cafes and late night jazz clubs of Saint Germain, where she met Brel and Brassens. "We were young, free and without cares," she recalled. "Three of us would go into a bar together, and 20 of us would come out."
She once failed to turn up for a meeting with Brel, whom she accompanied on visits to sing at Paris jails and hospitals. The Belgian singer went on to write a song about waiting in the rain for Madeleine with a bunch of lilacs in his hand. "When he first sang it in my presence he said: 'Now doesn't that remind you of something?'," she said.
She later moved to Alicante with a lover, where she set up the province's first French restaurant and got stopped by police for wearing a miniskirt during the dictatorship of General Franco. She and her lover later married, after continual harassment from Spanish police who demanded to know why they were living together under the same roof.
She collected strange animals, owning a boa constrictor and a monkey.
Her husband died in 1986 and the restaurant closed. Madeleine had nursed him through a long and agonising illness, and later regretted not obeying his instructions to remove the drips and tubes that kept him alive.
Rejected nursing home
She went on to support her teenage son, Domingo, by doing cleaning jobs. In 2003, however, she was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and knew she was dying. She refused to live with her son and grandchildren, or to die in a nursing home, and, instead, joined the Right to Die with Dignity group.
"Where has freedom gone when these people who help you to find physical and mental peace are pursued by the state?" she asked in her final letter. "Who cares about flesh and bone? It is a good idea to give the worms something to eat."
Her final wish? "I'd love to see my husband again. We could have another row. That would be great!"
El País yesterday named the two people from Right to Die with Dignity who observed her death as Leonor and Jorgé.
"I'm happy you're here," Madeleine told them after offering them cava, Spanish sparkling wine, and asking them to put drops of her favourite perfume, Opium, on her neck.
Spain's communist-led United Left coalition has repeatedly called for euthanasia to be legalised, but the Socialist government has ruled it out.
Songs of love and sorrow
Jacques Brel was the Belgian heart-throb whose songs of love and sorrow conquered the French-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s.
His passionate performances and poetic lyrics won him both critical and popular acclaim. He had one of the most celebrated voices in bohemian Paris and went on to become a film actor and a director.
Madeleine is included on at least three of his albums. The song speaks of a long and painful wait in the rain for the beautiful Madeleine with a bunch of lilacs in his hand and love in his heart. He sings:
Elle est tellement jolie
Elle est tellement tout ça
Elle est toute ma vie
Madeleine que j'attends là
But she never appears, and his plans to catch a tram to the cinema and declare his love come to nothing.
A heavy smoker, Brel died of lung cancer in 1978. He was recently voted the greatest Belgian of all time and has a metro station named after him.