“The baby had disappeared”: how Serge Gainsbourg dealt with the death of his second child with Bambou on his own

Before welcoming Lulu, Serge Gainsbourg and Bambou were to become parents of another boy. But the baby died before he was born. And the singer managed all alone.

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Serge Gainsbourg and Bambou

IN BRIEF

• In 1984, Bambou and Serge Gainsbourg discovered an unplanned pregnancy while filming in Gabon.
• Bambou learns that she is six months pregnant, but the fetus is too small and risks dying.
• Despite this tragedy, Bambou finds comfort in the birth of their son Lucien, nicknamed Lulu.

There was more to Bambou and Serge Gainsbourg than just Lulu. Before the birth of their son, the singer and his muse were to become parents for the first time. But they didn't know it. While filming in Gabon for Equateur, Bambou realized that something was wrong. “It's moving in my stomach. It's weird, sometimes painful. It worries me, I'm afraid I caught amoebas in Gabon”, she recounts in her autobiography.

“I go to the hospital. They do a blood test. They tell me, 'No, you don't have an amoeba. But you're pregnant. And have been for some time.' They do an ultrasound scan. On the screen a six-month-old fetus appears. I fall backwards. (…) I'm terrified”, Bambou remembers. After a long denial of pregnancy, she learned terrible news. “And even more terrified by what I'm soon to learn. The fetus seems perfectly normal, although much too small for its age. This means that it risks dying in my womb“, she wrote again.

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She “felt a lot” about it

In the columns of Le Figaro, we learn that her eldest child never had a first name. “When I woke up after the operation, the baby had disappeared. I never saw him. Serge managed everything with the doctors. I felt very bad about it”, confides the woman who was 25 at the time. Bambou and Serge Gainsbourg hardly spoke about this drama. Except one day, after the birth of their son Lucien. He was still very young at the time, but already aware of what his parents had been through.

“One day, Serge said to me: 'Do you remember when we lost…', and he stopped dead, realizing that Lulu, 3 years old, was listening. Lulu gave up her game and replied: ‘Yes, it was a boy, it was me and I came back’,told his mother in Paris Match. Serge turned pale and turned to me, frightened. Lulu didn't know anything and what could he know, at his age, of reincarnation ? It bordered on the paranormal.” But this scene lifted Bambou's spirits, devastated after the death of her first child.

Bambou: “the worst ordeal of my life”

“Losing this baby was the worst ordeal of my life. I thought that I had killed him, I felt so guilty. It was horrible. I wanted to let myself die but Serge was able to reassure me by suggesting that we have another child at us”, confided the last companion of the singer to Gala. Lulu is today the pride of Bambou. Even if the musician sometimes has difficulty following the same path as his famous dad.

“He's struggling”,  recently confided his mother in the columns of Libération. “I passed on values, principles to him. In fact, Serge was very strict. He wanted Lulu to be well-behaved, polite, respectful, added Bambou about his son Lucien. I feel like I've gotten there. But it was a full-time job.”