Bir-Hakeim Bridge: Inception and the Songs of Édith Piaf

Before anything else, let's listen to a song on this bridge: "Non, je ne regrette rien" by Édith Piaf, France's national songstress. The title means "No, I regret nothing." If it sounds familiar, you've probably seen Inception, Christopher Nolan's film with a tight plot, a fresh premise and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The movie is about dreams. DiCaprio plays a man who steals thoughts by entering other people's dreams, and this time he is hired to plant an idea, which is the "inception" of the title. If you plant information in someone's dream, they'll wake up feeling as though the idea had always been theirs. To pull off a perfect inception, the team needs an architect to design the dream world. When the architect first enters DiCaprio's dream to practice, the architect places mirrors on both sides of a dead-end space and turns it into a long bridge. That bridge is this one, Bir-Hakeim. DiCaprio then tells the architect not to use real places, because it makes dreams and reality hard to tell apart, and to design from imagination instead. When something goes wrong while stealing or planting information in a dream, the dreamers have to be forced awake, and a song is used to wake them at a set time. That song is the Piaf track we just heard.

Piaf sang it three years before her death, looking back on her life and declaring in a strong voice that she regretted nothing. She had a deeply unhappy childhood, suffered malnutrition, and nearly lost her sight. She was once suspected of murder when her mentor was killed, and she lost her lover in a plane crash. The song looks back on a hard life and washes away painful memories.

But Piaf's most famous song is a different one. While singing at the Moulin Rouge cabaret in Montmartre, she met a young newcomer and fell in love: the French actor and singer Yves Montand, handsome, silky-voiced and six years her junior. In the glow of that romance, she wrote the lyrics in just 15 minutes, with lines like "When you hold me, the world looks rose-colored." The song is "La Vie en Rose." If you have someone special beside you, hold hands and listen while watching the rosy glow of the Eiffel Tower. The view of the tower from this bridge is gorgeous and the mood is romantic, so newlyweds often come here for wedding photos. Even if it stings a little, watch them, to whom the world surely looks rose-colored, and toast their happiness as you listen to Piaf's "La Vie en Rose."