Édith Piaf Trivia
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49 free Édith Piaf trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Édith Piaf trivia quiz follows the Little Sparrow from a Belleville birth certificate to Père Lachaise. The easy questions cover her signature song, her height, the nickname that became her stage name, the boxer she loved and the actress who won an Oscar playing her. Then it digs into the biography: the nurse she was named after, the Normandy brothel where she was raised, the childhood blindness, the murdered nightclub owner who discovered her, the black dress, and the wartime accusations she had to answer. The hard end is for chanson devotees: who really wrote the music for La Vie en rose, which regiment adopted Non, je ne regrette rien, the composer she kept waiting for an hour, the songs she wrote for Marcel Cerdan and Yves Montand, the singers she launched, her two husbands, the Olympia concerts that saved a venue, her last recording and the Requiem Mass the Church finally granted her fifty years late. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on Piaf, her major songs, Marcel Cerdan, Théo Sarapo and the 2007 film before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our French music, Paris and 1950s music quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Édith Piaf's surname at birth?
Gassion
Gassion was the name of her father Louis, a street acrobat: she sang under it until she was 19, when the nightclub owner who discovered her rechristened her 'La Môme Piaf'.
Q 02Piaf's first name is said to honour which British nurse, executed two months before her birth?
Edith Cavell
Edith Cavell was shot by a German firing squad in October 1915 for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium, and the outcry was still fresh when Piaf was born that December.
Q 03In French slang, what does 'piaf' mean?
A small bird
A small bird, above all a sparrow: under five feet tall, the nervous young street singer was billed as 'La Môme Piaf', the kid sparrow, and the name stuck.
Q 04Which Hollywood blockbuster uses Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien' as a recurring signal in its plot?
Inception
Inception: the song is the cue that a 'kick' out of the dream is coming, and Hans Zimmer built the film's booming score from slowed-down fragments of Piaf's recording.
Q 05Where did Édith Piaf's grandmother bring her up for several years in Normandy?
In a brothel
In a brothel: her father's mother ran the house in the Norman town of Bernay, and the women who worked there helped look after the little girl.
Q 06Piaf claimed she was cured of childhood blindness after a pilgrimage honouring which saint?
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thérèse of Lisieux got the credit: Piaf said her sight came back, after about four years of near-blindness, when the women who looked after her took her to pray at the young nun's grave.
Q 07In 2023 Warner Music announced a Piaf biopic that would be narrated by what?
An AI copy of her voice
An AI copy of her voice, trained on hundreds of old recordings with her estate's blessing; her executors said hearing it felt like being back in the room with her.
Q 08Piaf's only child, Marcelle, died at the age of two from which illness?
Meningitis
Meningitis killed Marcelle, born when Piaf was a 17-year-old street singer; she never had another child, and decades later mother and daughter were laid in the same grave.
Q 09Which nightclub owner discovered Piaf singing on the street in 1935?
Louis Leplée
Louis Leplée heard her singing on a street corner, put her on at his club off the Champs-Élysées and packed her opening night with celebrities, Maurice Chevalier among them.
Q 10According to the legend carved on a Paris plaque, where was Édith Piaf born?
On a doorstep in the street
On a doorstep in the street, sheltered by a policeman's cape, runs the tale that she and her mother liked to tell; her birth certificate records a hospital delivery instead.
Q 11What happened in April 1936 to the nightclub owner who had discovered Piaf?
He was murdered at home
He was murdered at home by intruders who were never caught; Piaf was questioned by police and cleared, but the scandal nearly finished her career before it had begun.
Q 12Which lyricist and lover rebuilt Piaf's image in the late 1930s and gave her the stage name Édith Piaf?
Raymond Asso
Raymond Asso shut her old street acquaintances out, shortened 'La Môme Piaf' to Édith Piaf, and had songs written that turned her years on the streets into her act.
Q 13Which composer, Piaf's favourite collaborator, wrote the music for her hit 'Milord'?
Marguerite Monnot
Q 21Piaf's boxer lover died in 1949 when his flight crashed approaching a refuelling stop in which islands?
The Azores
The Azores: his Paris to New York flight flew into a mountain there on its way in to refuel, killing all 48 on board; he was hurrying to join Piaf, who was singing in New York.
Q 22Which song did Piaf record in May 1950 and dedicate to her lover killed in the 1949 air crash?
Hymne à l'amour
Hymne à l'amour was written for him while he was alive: she first sang it in September 1949, a few weeks before the crash turned her love song into a lament.
Q 23Piaf's long dependence on which drug began with the treatment she was given after a 1951 car crash?
Morphine
Marguerite Monnot set Piaf's moods to music for some 25 years, until a newcomer with a single song in 1960 pushed her aside as the singer's composer of choice.
Q 14In 1940 Piaf co-starred in the one-act play Le Bel Indifférent, written by which poet and filmmaker?
Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau wrote it for her, and the friendship lasted to the end: in October 1963 he died of a heart attack within hours of being told that Piaf was dead.
Q 15At the Moulin Rouge in 1944 Piaf worked with, and began an affair with, which singer-actor?
Yves Montand
Yves Montand was a little-known singer when she took him under her wing: she coached him, put him in her film Étoile sans lumière, and within a couple of years he was a star in his own right.
Q 16After the Liberation of France, Piaf had to answer to a tribunal on suspicion of what?
Collaborating with the Germans
Collaborating with the Germans, for whom she had sung in occupied Paris; she was cleared after her secretary, a Resistance member, testified that her visits to prison camps had helped French prisoners escape.
Q 17A devoted fan opened the only museum dedicated to Édith Piaf in what kind of Paris building?
His own small apartment
His own small apartment: Bernard Marchois, who met Piaf as a teenager, gave two rooms of his fourth-floor flat to her tiny shoes, letters and gold discs, and visitors had to telephone for an appointment.
Q 18Which singer turned 'La Vie en rose' into a disco-era single from her 1977 debut album?
Grace Jones
Grace Jones, until then best known as a fashion model, stretched Piaf's ballad into a seven-minute dance track on Portfolio, her first album.
Q 19At which New York concert hall did Piaf triumph in 1956 and return the following year?
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall crowned a turnaround: her first American audiences were cool towards her, until a glowing review in a New York paper changed her fortunes and won her a following.
Q 20Which French boxing champion did Piaf fall in love with during a 1947 tour of America?
Marcel Cerdan
Marcel Cerdan was married with three children, so the affair made headlines around the world; it lasted barely two years, yet she never got over him.
Morphine, prescribed by her doctors after the first of three serious car crashes: with drink, it turned her last decade into a round of clinics, collapses and comebacks.
Q 24Which future star spent the early 1950s as Piaf's secretary, chauffeur and songwriter before she launched his career?
Charles Aznavour
Charles Aznavour drove her, kept her diary and wrote her songs such as 'Plus bleu que tes yeux'; in return she took him on tour and taught him the tricks of the trade.
Q 25Who acted as matron of honour at Piaf's 1952 wedding to singer Jacques Pills?
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich stood beside her at the 1952 wedding; Pills spent the marriage trying, without lasting success, to get his bride off drink and drugs.
Q 26Piaf's second husband, Théo Sarapo, was 20 years her junior and had formerly worked as what?
A hairdresser
A hairdresser of 26 when they married, Sarapo was pushed on stage by Piaf as her last protégé; seven years after her death he was killed in a road accident and buried beside her.
Q 27Théo Sarapo's stage name, chosen by Piaf, approximates a Greek phrase meaning what?
I love you
I love you, s'agapo in Greek: Piaf coined the name for Theophanis Lamboukas, the Paris-born son of Greek parents, when she set about turning him into a singer.
Q 28Piaf and Sarapo had a hit duet in 1962 with which song?
À quoi ça sert l'amour ?
À quoi ça sert l'amour ? casts him as the doubter who asks what love is for and her as the one who knows; Sarapo had never sung before, and she coached him through the recording.
Q 29Who composed 'Non, je ne regrette rien', the song Piaf made her anthem in 1960?
Charles Dumont
Charles Dumont had been turned down by Piaf several times and nearly didn't go back; she kept him waiting, heard the song through, and declared it would go round the world.
Q 30Piaf dedicated her recording of 'Non, je ne regrette rien' to which body, which adopted the song as its own?
The French Foreign Legion
The French Foreign Legion: paratroopers of its 1st regiment, broken up after backing the failed 1961 putsch in Algiers, marched out of barracks singing it, and Legion soldiers sent a wreath to her coffin.