Two months later Piaf would fall into a coma. The singer would spend the last months of her life, slipping in and out of consciousness in her villa in Plascassier near Cannes. Piaf would finally pass peacefully away in her home in the South of France on 11 October 1963, dying on the same day as her old friend Jean Cocteau.
The news of Piaf's death caused a national outpouring of grief. She was forbidden a Mass by the archbishop of Paris (because of her lifestyle), yet her ceremony at Pere-Lachaise was bombarded by forty thousand fans. Charles Aznavour, whom she helped launch in show business, recalled that Piaf's funeral procession was the only time, since the end of World War II, that Parisian traffic came to a complete stop. Tens of thousands of fans flocked to Paris on 14 October to follow the singer's coffin to its final resting-place in the Père Lachaise cemetery. Today Piaf's tomb remains one of the most visited sites at Père Lachaise, thousands of fans making an annual pilgrimage to the cemetery to lay flowers on her grave.