The Immortal Johnny Hallyday

French media stories about his death have turned out to be premature, but Johnny Hallyday has continued to make headlines by suing the surgeon who treated his recent back injury.

The tale took a dramatic twist after his daughter, Laura Smet, was found unconscious in a Paris church. The papers have since revealed she is also the girlfriend of Julien Delajoux, the brother of the surgeon that her father is trying to sue.

“I am not torn,” she had written to one French newspaper the day before she was found. “The only important thing to me is the health of my father. I am his daughter. I love him,” the note said, raising questions over whether she tried to take her own life.

Paparazzi pictures of Hallyday taken since his daughter was found have at least brought relief and an end to the frenzied Internet rumours proclaiming the death of a national icon.

The 66-year-old singer, often dubbed the French Elvis, is a national symbol, a figure that looms over Gallic music and the day-to-day lives of an extraordinary number of French people.

The weekly Le Nouvel Observateur magazine affectionately described him as “a bowlegged Eiffel Tower.”

His life-or-death illness was a national drama played out on all the main evening news bulletins.

When it emerged that Hallyday had been admitted to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles Dec. 7 with an infection, it induced a sort of national anguish.

President Sarkozy reportedly arranged for regular updates to be sent to him in Copenhagen, where he was attending the World Climate Conference.

The Web was full of claims that Hallyday’s death was being kept secret by officials because they were afraid the news would topple the French into a collective depression.

“C’est fini,” one blogger wrote, apparently referring to Hallyday’s passing and possibly to the passing of a huge chunk of contemporary French culture.

Apparently it was almost finished as the singer was twice placed in artificial comas to enable medics to pump him with antibiotics to fight an infection that reportedly followed his back operation in Paris in November. On the second occasion it was three days before he recovered consciousness.

“I brushed against and rubbed shoulders with death,” Hallyday said in a letter made public after he was allowed to leave hospital Dec. 23.

Once described as one of France’s finest surgeons, Professor Delajoux is now being portrayed in the press as a dilettante socialite with a long list of former lovers and a criminal record for fraud and tax evasion.