As early as her first album, Dreamland, in 1996, her husky voice, her way of telling the story of her life, her failures, her losses, her insistence on the precariousness of existence, endow her with the aura of a princess of postmodern melancholy, of a duchess of heart-rending despair. Neither a show-off nor a crooner, between jazz and folk, she has created a very special kind of bittersweet climate. The neo-Billie Holiday label cropped up quickly because it was easy. “I was looking for a model to become a woman, and it was Billie Holiday who showed me the way. The school of Billie is a school of life, more than a school of singing,” she acknowledges. However, to find the real key, one must look to Bessie Smith, the Queen of Blues, discovered when Madeleine was very young.

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