She had a huge success in the big concert halls of the French capital and in the provinces, performing light, saucy and patriotic songs, several dozen of which were her own creations.

[5][3] Paula Brébion later described herself as the "véritable enfant de la balle parisienne", beginning her career in 1867 at the age of 6 when she was introduced to the director of the Théâtre du Vaudeville where her mother played the great leading roles.

[6] One day Pirola noticed her humming before going on stage and thought her voice was pretty, so asked her to try singing in the concert part of the show.

The next day, with a certain amount of stage fright before the curtain rose, Brébion sang La Fille à Papa, a big hit by Anna Judic.

On 16 August 1882, Brébion shared the stage with him and other artists in the play Un Crâne sous la Tempête as part of a performance in honour of Ernest Vaunel, an actor leaving for military service.

[12] Having never had a singing teacher, Paula Brébion trained herself, creating light, bawdy and patriotic songs such as L'Aigrette, Mon Petit Tapin, La Mobilisation, Recommençons si tu veux and Les 15 jours d'un Oiseau.

[15] Deeply in love with her country, she refused offers to sing in Germany because she "hated the Prussians"[6] and also resented the inhabitants of Antwerp: during one of her concerts, three spectators had to be expelled for protesting against one of her patriotic songs.

On 12 November 1903, she performed at the Eldorado with Dranem, Anna Thibaud, Eugénie Fougère, Harry Fragson, Felix Mayol, and several other singers in the matinee organised to raise money to support of the widow and orphans of the conductor Émile Galle.

[22] In 1912, she was engaged for a year in Montreal (Canada), notably in the operetta Mam'zelle Nitouche and the play Le Roi[23] at the Théâtre des Nouveautés.

[24] Having never contributed to her pension and having spent all the money she had earned during her successful years,[25] Brébion left Paris to live alone in a small flat she rented in Asnières-sur-Seine.

[28] In its 14 April 1929 edition, Paris-Midi announced that she was ill and in misery under the title Paula Brébion, ex-reine de la chanson attend du secours.

She asked the town hall of her commune for unemployment benefits but was refused because performing artists were no longer entitled to them there, unlike those living in Paris.

Following an article about her in L'Intransigeant on 21 April 1929, the board of directors of the Casino de Forges-les-Eaux, on the prompting of actor Pierre Juvenet, decided to give the opening gala of the establishment, scheduled for 16 June 1929, as a benefit for the Brébion.

"Paula Brebion, a former celebrity at La Scala and the Eldorado, also acclaimed in the concert cafés of Petersburg, Vienna, Turin, Milan, Florence, Naples, Madrid, Barcelona, Cairo, Brussels, etc., etc., was a great success, etc.. to whom Léon Vasseur, the famous composer, offered to create the operetta Mamz'lle Crénom, the one who was at the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques to play and sing La Reine de Golconde, and who, following in the footsteps of Judic and Jeanne Granier, became an actress after having been a singer, playing the comedy as far as America [sic], Canada, to come back to Brussels on all the stages, to Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille, where the roles of the famous Desclauzas were entrusted to her, who toured Baret until the war stopped her work and forced the artist to eat her savings, to sell little by little her jewellery, her furs, her furniture, Paula Brebion, today left without any resources, must have recourse to public pity at the age of 72.