Outside Serge Gainsbourg’s former home on a narrow street in Paris’s most expensive arrondissement, fans are lined up like pilgrims at a shrine, their wrists ink-stamped with the outline of their idol’s profile, now his posthumous trademark. They are the lucky ones. Long before the house – shut up for more than three decades since the singer-songwriter died – was opened to the public 11 days ago, the 30-minute tour slots had sold out until next year. There is an atmosphere of hushed reverence as the “rules” of the house are explained: no photos, no videos, no leaning on the glass barriers. We are also given headsets and advised to follow the instructions of Charlotte Gainsbourg, 52, daughter of Serge and the British actor Jane Birkin, who died in July. Charlotte’s breathy and emotional narrative, punctuated with happy and not so happy memories, accompanies our tour. The main entrance, a black door, opens into a long living room with white marble floor tiles and black diamond insets. The walls are covered in black felt. The Steinway piano is open, the ashtray next to the Gitanes and lighter is full of butts. A large black and white photograph of a topless Brigitte Bardot, one of Gainsbourg’s early lovers, stands out from the eclectic clutter of artefacts and furniture. In the tiny kitchen, the bottles of wine lined up on a shelf are empty. Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and Angostura bitters sit neatly arranged on shelves in an alcove. In this “very arranged mess”, as Charlotte calls it, of objects – furniture, photos, album covers, a collection of police badges – it is as if Gainsbourg has just popped out for another packet of cigarettes. The window and skylight blinds are closed, giving the place a tenebrous air. The house is like the man: dark, brooding, chaotic and a little rough around the edges. No 5 bis rue de Verneuil, with its graffitied and sticker-covered exterior walls, sits uncomfortably among the bourgeois neighbouring houses and flats in the one-way street. Gainsbourg bought the two-storey property in 1969 and lived there with Birkin until 1980, when she left him, and then until his death in 1991. He once said of it: “I don’t know if it’s a studio, a museum, a salon or a brothel.” For 32 years, Gainsbourg fans have flocked here to leave their mark on the walls and hoped for a peek inside. Charlotte first suggested she might let people in a decade ago, but the idea never saw the light of day until now. Gainsbourg is a French hero, adored not just as a singer-songwriter, but as a composer, poet, painter and philosopher. Towards the end of his life, prematurely ended at 62 by alcohol and several packets of filterless Gitanes a day, he risked destroying this legacy and being remembered as an increasingly sad, scruffy and dissolute roué. Today, he is either loved as a genius – he had 12 gold records, five double golds and six platinum – or despised as a crude, drunken provocateur and misogynist. François Mitterrand called him “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire” for the poetry of his compositions, but there was nothing poetic about a dishevelled Gainsbourg telling the French singer Catherine Ringer she was a “slut” and a “whore” live on a chatshow in 1986. The same year, he drunkenly pawed Whitney Houston, again on live TV, and announced in English: “I would like to fuck her.” His most famous song, the heavy-breathing and suggestive Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus, made with Birkin, sold more than 1m copies, reached No 1 in the UK charts and was banned in several countries. He courted further controversy by recording a song called Lemon Incest with Charlotte when she was only 12 or 13. (“The love we’ll never make together/Is the most beautiful, the rarest, the most disconcerting/The purest, the headiest”.) Through the headphones, Charlotte recounts, in a voice two notches up from a whisper, how the father she remembers was rarely without a briefcase stuffed with 500-franc notes – one of which he burned on TV, sparking more outrage – music scores and cigarettes. She tells how Gainsbourg always ate with the same fork – “he nicked it from Maxims [restaurant] … he also had a plate from Maxims” – and owned various ashtrays liberated from Parisian hotels; how she “would never have dared” play her father’s Steinway; how her mother was allocated a room for all her mess; and how her father preferred the bidet to the bath. “He was very clean but he didn’t wash his whole body … baths were not his thing. He would wash his feet and the rest in the bidet,” she says. In the bedroom, also lined in black, there is a tube of Smarties, a lollipop and chewing gum next to a low bed covered in a black mink counterpane with a baroque mermaid bench at its foot. There is a pause. Then Charlotte recounts how she, her half-sister Kate Barry (Birkin’s daughter with the film composer John Barry) and the model Bambou (Gainsbourg’s last partner) found the singer dead in this bed on 2 March 1991. “We found him on his side of the bed, the far right, one leg was sticking out, so I imagine he died in his sleep of a heart attack. We lay down beside him. And time stopped,” she says. Opposite the house, another property forms a Gainsbourg museum, tracing his family history and his path to fame. There is also a shop selling books and knick-knacks marked with the trademark profile, and a cafe-bar called the Gainsbarre, after the hard-drinking, aggressive and vulgar alter ego he adopted late in his career. In the queue outside No 5 bis, Ornella Barbé, 27, who was not born when Gainsbourg died, is waiting to get in. “I love Gainsbourg’s music, and his poetry inspired me enormously when I was younger.” she says. “I’m here to pay tribute to him. It’s incredible that we can enter this temple where so many things happened.” Charlotte has described the house as a “gateway” to understanding her father’s legacy. In a recent interview, she said: “I hope [the house] will surprise people and that they will feel the magic. I don’t feel like I’m putting people in a voyeuristic position.”