One posted photos of herself at the Louvre, gushing: “Every time I return to Paris, I remember there’s so much beauty and joy still to experience in the world”. La deuxième was spotted on a floating piano on the river Seine.
France’s president Emmanuel Macron has just about kept his counsel up to now but there is growing certainty that a slow tease comprising layers of confidentiality seductively dropped over recent days will end with a duet by Céline Dion and Lady Gaga at the glittering opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris on Friday night.
And not any old duet. The global superstars are expected to perform Édith Piaf’s ‘La Vie en Rose’, in a show of soft French power that a momentarily overwhelmed Macron evidently found rather difficult to keep to himself when lightly grillé about Dion’s Instagram posts.
“Apparently she has arrived in Paris, it’s great!” he confessed to the French television channel France 2. “I would be immensely happy if she could be at this opening ceremony, like all our compatriots.”
“I will not reveal anything, what [opening ceremony director] Thomas Jolly and all his teams have prepared”, Macron added with a gallic twinkle in his eye. “There is also a surprise.”
He concluded, with a smile: “I am not responsible for his schedule.”
Dion’s rumoured appearance would mark her first performance since she was forced to halt her touring schedule and step away from the spotlight after being diagnosed in December 2022 with Stiff Person Syndrome, a a rare, chronic neurological disorder that causes muscle stiffness and sometimes intense spasms. She last performed live in New York in the spring of 2020.
According to RTL, every effort has been made to keep the French-Canadian singer relaxed ahead of her comeback.
She arrived in Paris on a private jet trip from her home in Vegas and is staying in a sumptuous suite at the Royal Monceau on the Champs Elysee, from which Gaga, the American singer-song writer who was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanottav, was coincidentally also seen emerging this week, blowing kisses to her fans.
According to some media reports, Dion is being paid a tidy €2m fee and will be dressed in a pink and black feather cape from Dior. As for Gaga, the tight security around the Seine did not stop one intrepid fan posting a photograph of someone who looked very much like her by a white piano on a floating island on the river on Monday.
Neither women will find it difficult linguistically to perform “La Vie en Rose”. Dion was born in French-speaking Charlemagne, Quebec, a small town from Montreal.
Lady Gaga, whose mother is half Italian and half French, has described her mastery of the language as “merdique” but she has talked in the past of how her confidence in the language grows when she gets to practice.
Dion performed “The Power of the Dream” at the opening ceremony at the Atlanta games in 1996, a song written and produced specially for the occasion, and rumours that the 56-year-old was aiming for an Olympics comeback had swirled since she appeared on the cover of French Vogue in April.
Dion had spoken of a gruelling physical fitness program to regain her strength and health from a condition that she once likened to strangulation.
“I want to be my best self. I want to see the Eiffel Tower again,” she told Vogue.