In 1991, she balanced on a trapeze, a little bird sprinkled with Chanel Coco perfume, directed by Jean-Paul Goude. Vanessa was 18 years old, and she wouldn't let anyone say that those were the greatest years of her life. Today, she's back in the house on Cambon street, "ambassadress," as the advertising execs say, of a new line of bags hand-designed by Karl Lagerfeld. Thirteen years have passed between these two grand campaigns. Seeing her sip her cappuccino, on a settee in a mythical Hollywood hotel [Chateau Marmont] where she's accustomed herself to giving interviews, you can hardy believe it. The ex-"Lolita schoolgirl" has the air of a college student, or more precisely, of a "flower child" that would have gathered on the Berkeley campus during the summer of '69. Between her fingers, a cigarette rolled in brown paper. Under her worn velvet coat, she wears flowered overalls, a large Indian scarf, a T-shirt, old, torn jeans, and perfume. The eternal child-woman, the eternal hippie?

Vanessa Paradis is the same; however, everything has changed. "I'm a bit more mature and intelligent," she says, in her high voice, a little raspy, utterly recognizable. "Subtler, too." Happier, without a doubt. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, the young star burned on her way to the top has found her reason to live in the tattooed arms of the American actor Johnny Depp. The beauty and the bad boy (the US press love to write that she "tamed" him) now have two children, Lily-Rose and Jack, and live an ultrachic bohemian life between France and America. "We don't want our children to be raised by a nanny, but we still want to work, so we take them along everywhere," she explains. "We travel with an enormous amount of things, so that they have the same visual and sensory references everywhere we go: Jack's crib, their blankets, their toys, even the fabric to cover the changing table. On every trip, there are thirty bags, at least!"

Between two film shoots, the Depp-Paradis' move into their house in the South of France. "There we have a pretty boring life," she says, ironically. "We go the grocery, we cook, we eat, and watch our kids." And then there is L.A., where the little family spends more and more of their time. After years spent working on the fringes of Hollywood, Johnny Depp is suddenly once again the It Boy of major studios after his off-the-wall interpretation of pirate Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean." The film brought in $621 million around the world, a record number for Disney, and garnered Depp an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Vanessa is not complaining about it. "In Los Angeles, I feel extremely protected. It's a big city, but I don't get the same looks as I do in Paris, because very few people have seen my films. My identity, here, is above all Mom. My life has the rhythm of dance lessons, art classes, doctor visits, trips to the parks, their friends. I kind of live in a bubble, focused on my family." Since the success of PotC, however, "the press and people are very excited. That makes life difficult. Not as difficult like if I were working in McDonalds, of course, but more difficult than before..."

But what about her career? After the birth of her children, "I work between ellipses," she says. "I'm not a song machine. Now that I write them myself, it's very, very slow..." As for films, she will start soon on the first movie of the Girl on the Bridge's screenwriter, Serge Frydman, but she doesn't make any particular effort to work in America. "I don't have international ambitions. I don't even want to get a Hollywood agent. I'm very happy with what I do, that's enough to fulfill me." It seems she has nothing to worry about, since her familiar happiness makes her rather desirable. Looking back, 2003 will have been an excellent year for Vanessa Paradis. "Never before had so many ad campaigns been proposed to me. I think it's because I'm 30 now, my working mom image, and of course my boyfriend, who is so talented." She said yes to Chanel because it's a "mythical" brand. She will thus be the face of the "Cambon line," a new set of bags inspired by the famous one launched by Mademoiselle Chanel in 1955. "I'm selling myself, of course, but I don't at all feel like I'm compromising myself," she say. "Chanel, for me, is the absolute femininity. I love the jackets. They fit just right."

Vanessa Paradis has a special place in the French psyche: the less we see her, the less we can do without her. But how can we be upset with her? When she balanced on the trapeze in a gilded cage envisioned by Jean-Paul Goude, two albums and a feature film were already on her resume. She had worked hard. Today, she benefits from the California sun, from her children, and life's little pleasures: "To drink a latte at Starbucks, to listen to Marvin Gaye and Tom Waits, to eat dark chocolate, to watch 'Finding Nemo' once a week, and, at night, to slip on my old moccasins." A certain idea of paradise.