No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Edith was growing up in a time when the calendar of saints’ days shaped the commonly held notion of divine providence at work in daily life. That her miraculous cure had taken place on August 25, Saint Louis’s day, would not have escaped the household’s attention, for it was also Louis Gassion’s saint’s day, and for this reason doubly revered by Edith. Though Saint Thérèse was, in some way, her spiritual benefactor, she seemed to be working in concert with her beloved, though equally absent, father.

  Legend has it that on a Gassion family outing to one of the Normandy beaches before Edith regained her sight, Louis appeared, the child heard his voice, and she exclaimed, “Papa!” It is more likely that she saw her father whenever his travels allowed him to visit Falaise, where she often spent weekends with her cousins. According to his sister Zaza, he strolled around Falaise with Edith, treated her to the local specialty, buckwheat crêpes, and showed her William the Conqueror’s castle. Family members also visited Bernay. When Edith’s cousin Marcelle spent Sundays there, the girls tried to get around their grandmother’s objections to their socializing with the boarders: “We wanted to see [them], of course, but she would send us back to the kitchen.”

  It is also said that once Edith could see and consequently grasp the nature of the transactions in the household, the curé persuaded her grandmother and father that she must be removed from these evil influences. It is equally possible that Maman Tine told Louis that it was time he took responsibility for his daughter, and that, as an experienced busker, he knew that an endearing seven-year-old passing the hat would inspire generosity in his audiences. Whatever Louis’s motivation, about this time he borrowed funds from his mother to buy an old trailer, signed with the Caroli Circus, and, with Edith in tow, headed for Belgium, where the troupe was booked on a lengthy tour.

  Although many details are missing from the third phase of Piaf’s childhood, what is known of her life after Bernay is, to say the least, picaresque. We must rely on the stories that she chose to tell much later, when summing up this period in interviews and her dictated memoirs.

  Edith’s playfulness survived in these new circumstances, even though her father proved a hard taskmaster. “Papa was not a tender man,” Piaf said, “and I received my share of blows.” Believing that her father did not love her, she tried to win his heart, and treasured the rare occasions when he kissed her. Piaf spoke of him admiringly, despite the blows: “Gifted athletically, extraordinarily agile and supple, … he meant to be his own master, going wherever he felt like going, taking orders from no one.” Like other wanderers, Louis was temperamentally opposed to a settled existence.

  Her recollections of their life together blend aspects of Les Misérables with elements of fairy tales. “I lived in the trailer and did the chores,” Piaf explained. “My days started early, the work was hard, but I liked the constantly changing horizons of our vagabond life. It was a thrill to discover the enchanted world of ‘the travelers,’ the fanfares, the clowns’ spangled costumes, the lion tamers’ gold-braided tunics.”

  A snapshot taken on the steps of their trailer shows her father looking dignified in a shirt and tie, a younger girl, three attractive women (presumably performers), and a beaming, fashionably dressed Edith with thick, dark bangs—a reconstituted family of sorts in front of her new home. Aged seven or eight, she looks very much like her father, who presides over his female companions. Piaf’s account of this time omits any mention of her original family—her mother and her little brother, Herbert, who was born in 1918 and was almost immediately handed over to the state social services when Line Marsa signed up for a singing engagement in Turkey.

  The few children whose families traveled with the circus played together after their chores were done. During a game of hide-and-seek, Edith hid in the space between the lions’ cages, within reach of their claws. After some time a search party, including her father and the lion tamer, found her and ordered her to tiptoe out without disturbing the beasts. “I was so afraid of getting punished that I made Papa promise not to beat me,” Piaf told a journalist. Her father agreed, but once she was safe, he went back on his word.

  Had Louis Gassion been able to control his temper, his career might have taken off, she believed. Calling himself an “antipodean” acrobat (he stood on his head) or a “cosmopolitan” contortionist (he traveled widely), Louis twisted himself into strange shapes—the head-seat (a head-to-buttocks backbend), the human knot (legs behind the neck), extreme splits, and perilous handstands—while awed audiences held their breath. With more care, Piaf thought, he could have joined the Medrano Circus, the home of the clowns and acrobats who, since the 1900s, had inspired artists like Cocteau and Picasso. (At this time, the Medrano already had a contortionist called the King of Vertigo: he maneuvered on a chair balanced in the neck of a bottle that was itself perched on a ten-foot pole.)

  But Louis was not one to take pains, nor could he submit to discipline for long. Edith’s time with the circus ended abruptly when her father walked out in a fit of anger, sold the trailer, and headed back to France with his daughter. “We kept on traveling,” Piaf recalled, “staying in hotels instead of the trailer, and my father became his own boss. Mine too, of course.”

  The lives of itinerant entertainers are nearly impossible to document—they lived in defiance of social norms, a tribe of outcasts with its own rules and freedoms. The scenery changed as Gassion père et fille toured the country, yet one day was much like another. The high point was always Louis’s performance. “Father spread his ‘hanky’ (his mat) on the ground, gave his spiel, and went through his routine,” Piaf recalled. He told onlookers to show their appreciation to his daughter, who would pass among them before doing le saut périlleux. One day bystanders complained that saltimbanques were liars: the little girl had not done the perilous jump, as promised. Louis came up with a neat reply. Surely they didn’t want the child, who was weak from the flu, to risk breaking her neck—they would be satisfied by hearing her sing.

  At this point in telling the story of her life, Piaf forgot her evenings on the café table in Bernay. “I had never sung before,” she said decades later. “The only song I knew was ‘La Marseillaise.’ ” This patriotic choice can be seen as a reframing of her “first” performance, in the years when France was recovering from the Great War. But it is of interest to note that as a fledgling performer in 1936, Piaf told a journalist that she had sung “L’Internationale”—then the anthem of communist and socialist parties worldwide. Whichever song she performed that night, they took in twice as much money as usual.

  From then on, Louis made sure that Edith sang at the close of each show. She learned several new songs, including the popular “Nuits de Chine.” One wonders if audiences noticed the incongruity of a pre-pubescent child’s crooning this racy fox-trot, which evoked opium-drenched delights in exotic settings: “Nuits de Chine / Nuits calines / Nuits d’amour / Nuits d’ivresse” (Chinese nights / Caressing nights / Sensual nights / Intoxicating nights”). Perhaps this strangeness only enhanced the song’s appeal.

  Piaf recalled only a few names and details of their travels in the next few years. At Lens, a town in northern France where they stopped on the way from Belgium to Normandy, the little girl spied a “rich child’s” doll in a toy shop: “She held out her little porcelain hands to me. I had never seen anything so beautiful!” Since the doll cost the equivalent of their expenses that day, it was out of the question. Edith was astonished when her father presented it to her the next morning, their performance having earned enough for him to buy the doll before leaving town. “I understood that he loved me,” she said, then added, “in his way.”

  At Le Havre, when Edith was scheduled to sing at a movie theater before the film, she awoke with a fever and a raspy cough. She stayed in bed all day but insisted on going on that night. Although her father was opposed to her endangering her health, she prevailed. “For people in our situation, it was worth making an effort for the take, however small. I sang, an
d afterward Papa gave me two big kisses on the cheek. I was startled and happy. He had never been so proud of his daughter.”

  On another occasion, a middle-class couple who were smitten with the child proposed to take her off Louis’s hands. They offered him a hundred thousand francs—a very large sum—for the right to adopt her. “I’m not in the business of selling kids,” she heard him say: “Why not make one of your own?” It is telling that Piaf situated this incident—to her mind, the proof that “he would never consent to being separated from me”—at Sens, the town that was the site of her parents’ marriage.

  During the time when Line remained in Turkey, Louis did not lack for companionship. “A handsome man, fickle, and an incorrigible womanizer, he was never alone for long,” his daughter recalled. When people asked whether she had a mother, he always replied, “More than she needs!” Some of these temporary “mothers” were kind, she said, some less so, but none of them made her suffer: “Papa wouldn’t have tolerated it.” But, she allowed that some had been unkind. Of a certain Lucienne, Piaf said, “I still remember her thrashings, but that’s because it was during her reign that I saw Papa cry for the first time”—an interpretation that lets Louis off the hook as being Edith’s covictim. Perhaps the child found comfort in Saint Thérèse’s promise that prayer could soften the hardest of hearts.

  When Edith was ten, Louis formed a liaison with a woman named Sylviane who lived in Lyon. Their son died soon after his birth; Louis took Edith on tour, leaving Sylviane to mourn alone. Shortly after their return, Edith ran away. On the train, she told her fellow passengers that her parents beat her, and that she was escaping to her grandmother’s in Normandy. A kindly woman pretended to be her guardian when the conductor came; Edith managed to get all the way to Bernay. “I had worked it all out,” she told a journalist, whose reactions to this tale are missing, as are her reception at Maman Tine’s and her father’s mood when he came to retrieve her. Though the tale of her escape recalls the perils of Victor Hugo’s Cosette, it is clear that the ten-year-old knew a great deal about travel, and even more about telling a story.

  In Piaf’s recollections of these years, Louis’s liaisons seem like stops on an amorous tour de France. He had the seductive charm of those who get on by ingratiating themselves with others. Shrewd when it came to recruiting women, he placed advertisements in the regional newspapers: “Young woman wanted to look after child. Job includes enjoyable travel.” Job candidates must have been struck by this diminutive father-daughter couple and may have wondered to what extent another person would be welcome.

  A second Sylviane signed on in Nancy, when Louis and Edith were touring Alsace-Lorraine. This romance lasted long enough for Louis to bring his new partner to Falaise to meet his family. In the photograph taken that day, Edith looks about ten. She stands between Louis and Sylviane—who is identified on the back of the photo as “the girlfriend of the moment.” Edith’s expression implies a precocious sense that while domestic partners come and go, the love of father and child remains the lodestar of relationships.

  By then she also knew what it took to survive. From her father she learned an entertainer’s sense of timing, techniques for tugging on the audience’s heartstrings, and the sort of patter likely to produce a good take. Her years with Louis were an education in “street smarts,” a set of skills rarely acquired at school. Although she had just learned to read before leaving Bernay and would remain semi-literate until adulthood, she was adept at reading faces and judging an audience’s—or a stepmother’s—mood.

  What was more, the Gassions’ bohemian way of life had trained Edith to meet each situation as it arose, and to respect, or at least accept, all sorts of people. The years on the road with Louis offered a telling contrast to the mock respectability Edith had known in Bernay. Their hand-to-mouth life was the opposite of, though also the complement to, the bourgeois existence Piaf would never fully adopt, even long after her success. At heart she would always be a traveler—turning each of her many dwellings into a Gypsy caravan.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1926–1932

  What did she recall of her years with her father? Piaf asked herself near the end of her life. “A new mother every three months: his mistresses, who were more or less kind to me, depending on whether my songs—I was already singing, and doing the collection—brought me money or catcalls.”

  Things might have turned out differently with more reliable mothering, she thought. “I had gone through a peculiar apprenticeship in life and love, which hardly disposed me toward romanticism. My mother had not been by my side to teach me that love could be tender, faithful, and sweet, so very sweet.” Dictating these thoughts to a journalist friend, the aging Piaf did not reflect that it may have been this changing cast of maternal substitutes that made her cling to the idea of unconditional love—the tender, faithful, sweet affection that she sought for the rest of her life in her chosen companions.

  Memory is selective, especially when one is retelling one’s life to bring out its better moments. Piaf said nothing about the reasons for her return to Paris with her father, which occurred at some point in her early adolescence. The one anecdote that she did recall from this time is indicative. It associates her mother’s reappearance in their life with a fleeting family reunion and a maternal kiss.

  One evening, Louis took Edith, then about eleven, to a bistro in the raffish Faubourg Saint-Martin neighborhood, where entertainers gathered before their gigs at local cafés and cabarets. They were standing together at the bar when a woman with dark hair, thick bangs, and large earrings asked to embrace Edith. “My father doesn’t allow me to kiss people I don’t know,” she replied. Smiling, Louis told her to go ahead: “You have my permission; that’s your maman, the real one.”

  Although Piaf’s recollection of this meeting is tantalizingly brief, her brother, Herbert, provided a few more details years later. Having recently returned from four years in Turkey, their mother had taken Herbert to live with her in Paris. An agent was handling Line’s career; she turned up that night because she was singing in a club across the street. “While our parents talked, Edith and I played outside on the sidewalk. Then Mother took me away and my sister went with Father. That’s all.” Line had not, as Piaf told an interviewer, invited them to a restaurant, nor had she tried to reclaim Edith—instances of wishful thinking, Herbert implied, on his sister’s part.

  The details of Line’s career are equally tantalizing. She returned to Paris in the mid-1920s, about the time when Edith and Louis settled there. According to Herbert, she found occasional gigs at cabarets like the Chat Noir or the Mikado in Pigalle, and the Monocle, a lesbian club, in Montparnasse, but more often performed in the beuglants (working-class dives), where her daughter would also belt out the melancholy ballads known as chansons réalistes.

  The tradition of “realistic song”—a nostalgic, often sentimental, evocation of Parisian working-class life—dates back to before the Great War, when performers like Aristide Bruant and Eugénie Buffet entertained audiences with satiric or fatalistic lyrics that formed a counter-myth to bourgeois celebrations of the city. At the time Edith re-encountered her mother, Line was presenting herself as part of this still-vibrant tradition. No longer a lowly street singer, she also sang at the bals-musettes (dance halls), where workers, small-time crooks, and artists in search of inspiration mingled in the easy warmth of these establishments. Line may have had some success in her years abroad, which coincided with the twenties vogue for French culture in Turkey—from French bureaucracy to dances like the java, a light waltz, and parigot songs, belted out in the tough accents of a typical Parisian.

  It is likely that Line knew Fréhel, the notorious chanteuse réaliste, who was also in Turkey during these years. Judging by Line’s repertoire, which included songs first popularized by Fréhel, she modeled her act on that of the better-known performer—a savvy choice, even though Fréhel had long been famous for her drug-addled personal life. Line’s return to Paris
at the time when Fréhel was making her comeback there helped establish Piaf’s mother as a chanteuse réaliste for those who could not afford to hear Fréhel at the music-halls (variety theaters) but came instead to dance at the kind of neighborhood joint where Line was singing the night of the Gassion family reunion.

  One wonders whether Edith talked to her mother about their métier, whether Line shared with her daughter the secrets of their unpredictable trade. Chanson-réaliste lyrics, the most important part of the song, were usually sorrowful, the music in a minor key. Given that much of this material was in the same vein, it was important to choose songs that corresponded to one’s “type,” the persona a singer created for her audience. And since listeners liked to feel connected to their favorites, it was not enough to know your type: you had to play the part as if it meshed with your existence. It was said of the best interpreters of this tradition—Fréhel, Damia, and soon Piaf herself—that they sang the way they lived, their songs came from the heart. (The extent to which they consciously sustained this perception went unnoticed.)

  If Edith had studied her mother’s repertoire, she would have formed certain ideas about her. Line became known for her version of “La Valse en mineur,” a dark Fréhel tune described as a valse réaliste. The lyrics evoke a neighborhood dance hall where young toughs spin their girls to the sounds of an accordion. Songs of this kind reflected the hopes of the working-class audiences that flocked to the bals-musettes for moments of happiness, at the same time hinting that such moments were all the more precious because of their brevity.

  “La Valse en mineur” was bittersweet in its allusions to fleeting pleasures; “La Coco,” another Fréhel song in Line’s repertoire, was downright disturbing. The singer, in search of her unfaithful lover, consoles herself with champagne, morphine, and cocaine (the coco of the title), then, one night, finding him with another, stabs him in the heart. Since then she has only “la coco” to turn to: “Je veux de la coco / Ça trouble mon cerveau / L’esprit s’envole / Près du Seigneur / Mon amant du coeur / M’a rendue folle.” (“I want cocaine / It troubles my brain / My soul flies apart / Closer to God / The love of my heart / Has driven me mad.”) This noir tale of love’s (and cocaine’s) ravages hinted at Line’s addiction, a maternal heritage that Piaf would find hard to bear.