Edith Piaf

Photo Mosaic

Edith Piaf turned her own suffering into a nation's song, and her chart is built for exactly that alchemy. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion in Paris in 1915, she began singing on the streets as a child and rose to become France's national chanteuse. Her Sun in Sagittarius carries the free-spirited wanderer's fire, the restless traveller who gathers life and moves on, radiating a jovial luck that carried her from poverty to the world's great stages. That Sun sits in the second house of worth and resources: she was self-made, a person of value who shone through earning her living, spinning the raw material of her days into gold. Her Gemini Moon gave the quick, changeable, chatty psyche and the revolving door of loves, while her Scorpio Ascendant supplied the all-or-nothing intensity, the phoenix mask of one who kept rising from ashes through poverty, illness and addiction. Crucially her Moon falls in the seventh house of partnership, the emotional life poured into the beloved, and so her greatest songs, La Vie en Rose, Hymne à l'amour, Non je ne regrette rien, are love, loss and heartbreak made flesh. She died at 47, but her voice still aches across the century.