No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  Not all chansons réalistes are as doleful as “La Valse en mineur” or as dark as “La Coco,” but the actor Michel Simon, who began his career in a bal-musette where Line was performing, remembered her singing only the saddest songs in the repertoire. Her low, plaintive voice failed to please listeners, who wanted something brighter. Yet Line did not lack talent, Herbert Gassion believed. Within a few years’ time, when Edith auditioned at one of the nightspots where Line had appeared, the manager said to come back when she could sing as well as her mother. Herbert concluded that Line was talented but unable to take advantage of what came her way.

  His remarks are charitable, given that some time after the Gassions’ reunion, Line again abandoned her son. The boy lived with family friends, then at the mercy of the welfare system, an experience that prompted him to enlist in the colonial army as soon as he came of age. Herbert would say nothing about his mother’s many “mistakes” except that in later years, she was badly “adrift.”

  In addition to learning that Line was a drifter, Edith may have formed the opinion that mothers often abandon their children. About this time, Louis filed for divorce, giving as his residence Maman Tine’s establishment in Bernay. The decree became final on June 4, 1929, when he was nearing fifty and Edith was thirteen. Still touring with her father on occasion (by this time, Louis may have found it hard to twist himself into knots), she met the last in the series of stepmothers who were more or less kind.

  In 1930, on what may have been a farewell tour, Louis placed an ad in the Nancy newspaper and found a new partner, Jeanne L’Hôte, called Yeyette, who was only twenty, five years older than Edith. The new stepmother and stepdaughter moved to Belleville with Louis, higher up the hill, at 115 rue de Belleville, but not far from where Edith had lived as an infant. (If they learned of Aîcha’s death on July 18, 1930, no mention was later made of it.)

  Yeyette gave birth to Edith’s half sister, Denise, on February 8, 1931, but refused Louis’s offer of marriage, a puzzling decision given the stigma attached to status as a fille-mère (unwed mother). Edith ran away several times, only to be brought back by her father, who was her legal guardian. Yeyette was too busy with Denise to discipline her unruly stepdaughter, and Edith too attached to Louis to share his affections with his new family. She spent most of her time away from home.

  Despite the locals’ treatment of pretty girls who were not en ménage (shacked up) as fair game, the men of Belleville did not pose a threat. An unattached female was often the butt of innuendos designed as much to impress other men as to attract her attention, but Edith knew how to give as good as she got. Moreover, she did so in the piquant local slang and with a titi-parisien accent (a corruption of “good French” that marked one as working-class). This precocious knowledge stood her in good stead while she established herself as one of the “regulars” who sang in the streets and on weekends, at the bals-musettes that perpetuated the old traditions even as the village landscape was changing.

  From the Gassions’ apartment halfway up the hill it took barely fifteen minutes to amble down to Belleville’s social center, the square at the bottom of the street. Popular tunes wafting from the cafés mingled with the outdoor musicians’ waltzes and rumbas. Whenever the young accordionist Jo Privat, a local favorite, accompanied Edith, ragpickers hushed their cries to listen, and housewives dropped coins from their windows.

  In the 1920s, the French working class rarely had access to records; songs were popularized mainly through the street singers’ repertoires. It helped to come equipped for performances with petit-format sheet music to sell, the small-size scores printed by music publishers for this purpose. One day at a publisher’s office Edith met a young music fan, Pierre Hiégel, who would become one of her impresarios. “I bought her coffee and a croissant, which was all I could afford,” Hiégel recalled. “We stayed in touch for the rest of her life.” He was awed by her ability to memorize a song after hearing it a few times, and even more by her intelligence: “Right after a real heartbreaker she would sing a few more subtle songs, the better to sock you in the guts with the next number!”

  Edith soon became known in Belleville for her astounding voice, her saucy charm, and her give-and-take, the chaffing repartee that Parisians call la gouaille. She was often seen in the cafés—at the Vielleuse, where a statue of a woman playing the hurdy-gurdy on the roof welcomed customers, and the new star Berthe Sylva performed the latest chansons réalistes. In such settings Edith learned the songs that made up her first repertoire—whose lyrics bemoan woman’s fate while celebrating affections nourished by wine, banter, and moments of joy. She was embraced because she sang as she spoke—with the titi accent of her neighbors.

  The Belleville spirit, a blend of plucky defiance and fatalism, came out in force in the week before Bastille Day, when garlands festooned the streets and dance floors appeared in front of the cafés. Each evening, couples holding each other tight swayed to the java while leaning sideways to compensate for the slope of the street. It is easy to imagine Edith and her friends singing lyrics made popular by Fréhel and Berthe Sylva, tales of young women like themselves who had been seduced by swaggering charmers but saw the error of their ways.

  On the nights leading up to the Quatorze (July 14), fireworks went off every few minutes; building façades turned blue, white, and red in the reflected light. The festivities continued long after midnight, as restaurants served late suppers of mussels marinière with fries. The sky grew bright again when the fire brigade marched up the hill bearing their torches. “Everyone kissed, everyone sang, no one, young or old, thought of sleeping,” one of Edith’s friends observed: “We weren’t rich or educated … but how we laughed!”

  By the winter of 1931–32, when she had turned sixteen, the Great Depression was making itself felt in France. Unemployment was higher than usual, with no safety net for the impoverished, and little hope for those who lacked either an education or middle-class manners. Edith managed to find a job in the posh sixteenth arrondissement, on the other side of Paris, at a creamery. After six days of waking at 4 a.m. to make morning deliveries, and, one imagines, engaging in some insubordinate behavior, she was fired. She lasted only three days at her next workplace, another creamery, on the Left Bank, then made one more unsuccessful attempt at employment, in another of these establishments. Before leaving this job, she met an employee named Raymond, who also hoped to become an artiste. He taught her to play the banjo; they worked on songs to perform together with his girlfriend, Rosalie.

  Their trio, “Zizi, Zézette, and Zouzou,” featured Raymond on banjo and Rosalie crooning in the background, behind Edith’s powerful voice. Piaf often retold the improbable tale of their first outing. The three Z’s were to appear at an army barracks in Versailles, where Edith (Zouzou?) had once performed with Louis. They booked a hotel room, ate dinner, and toasted the owner with a post-prandial rum—all on credit. When no one showed up at the barracks, the trio decided to forget the hotel. Hoping to find shelter, they went to the police station, only to run into the hotel-keeper and his wife. After much wrangling, the police chief talked the angry couple out of filing charges against the young performers, who promised to pay their debt after singing at a nearby base the following night. The appreciative audience there allowed them to keep their word. They again toasted the hotel-keeper, but Edith stuck out her tongue as they went out the door.

  There is no record of the trio’s performing again. They broke up after Raymond initiated Edith into sexual love. In their time together, Edith saw that she could summon her powers of invention when she found herself in a tight spot. With the confidence of a cocky sixteen-year-old, one whose radiance drew crowds even before her voice stopped them in their tracks, she decided to sing not just for Belleville, but for all of Paris. She would go it alone until she found company. Meanwhile, she was learning the bluesy songs popularized by Fréhel, Berthe Sylva, and her new model, Damia, known as “the tragedienne of song.”

  Whereas Fréhel w
as notorious for her confrontational manner (she regularly told audiences, “Shut your traps; I’m opening mine”), Damia had a more subtle performance style. Following Damia’s example, Edith learned soulful tunes to balance the dark “realism” of her borrowed repertoire. She kept on belting out Damia’s parigot songs, like “J’ai l’cafard” (“I’m bored”), which recalls “La Coco” in its allusion to “Drogues infâmes / Qui charment les femmes” (“vile drugs that harm / and women charm”). But she also sang one of Damia’s greatest successes, “Les Deux Ménétriers” (“The Two Fiddlers”). This “macabre gallop” urges the dead to come back to life by loving unstintingly: “Il vous faut aimer encore! / Aimez donc! Enlacez vous!” (“You have to love again! / Start loving! Wrap yourselves around each other!”) Edith’s rendition of this stirring call to love echoed in the streets like an anthem for the poor, who had little but mutual affection to rely on.

  Some time after the birth of Denise, Louis acquiesced to Edith’s wish for independence on the condition that she remain in Belleville in a rented room, paid for with her earnings. Her father kept an eye on her through acquaintances like Camille Ribon, an acrobat whose specialty was standing on his thumbs. Ribon, who taught acrobatics to the neighborhood children, looked after Edith, though she showed no aptitude for his art. (He would be one of the old friends whom she helped to support once she became famous.)

  Edith visited Ribon one day when a younger girl was going through her paces. Although a talented gymnast, the girl was plain, with narrow, darting eyes. They began talking. At fourteen, Simone Berteaut, known as Momone, worked in a factory assembling car headlights. Momone was impressed by Edith’s tales of life on the street, and even more by her earnings. She sang only when she felt like it, Edith explained; she was her own boss. Momone should work for her, she said unexpectedly. She could take the collection, as Edith had done with Louis, since Edith earned enough for both of them.

  “I was bowled over.… I’d have followed her to the ends of the earth,” Berteaut would write in her spirited but misleading life of the singer, in which she presents herself as Edith’s half sister. Later in life, Piaf called Berteaut her mauvaise génie (the evil spirit who brought out the worst in her) and omitted her from her memoirs. But at sixteen she was happy to find a friend who would do her bidding. When there were two of you, she told the younger girl, audiences took you seriously; if the sidekick had music to distribute, they didn’t see you as beggars.

  Madame Berteaut offered no resistance to the plan except to demand compensation for her daughter’s wages. According to Berteaut, whose book is most reliable on their early years, Edith agreed to pay her room, board, and fifteen francs a day, to be turned over to her mother. An understanding was reached, and the young girl left home to become Edith’s foil. No one seems to have reflected that their status as self-sufficient young women resembled that of the other sort of streetwalkers, the filles who figured prominently in the popular imagination and in Edith’s repertoire.

  The girls shared a room at the Hôtel de l’Avenir—a name that seemed like a good omen. She would become someone in the future, Edith told Momone, often stopping in churches to light candles and pray for guidance. But Momone, whose upbringing was that of a guttersnipe, was puzzled by Edith’s faith in God and her devotion to Saint Thérèse. The younger girl’s fixation on her “big sister,” composed of gratitude, jealousy, and resentment, would warp her perceptions of their life together and her own role in Piaf’s path to success.

  Enchanted with their freedom, the friends rose late and took their time before going out. Edith had to drink coffee and gargle before performing, but once she was ready, she had “that same voice … the voice worth millions later on.” She sang to be heard at a distance, her voice coming from her chest as well as through what musicians call the “mask”—the resonators in the head—which enhanced her titi accent and gave her the nasal tone common to singers needing to project over street noise.

  Edith planned their itineraries according to the day of the week and the clientele. On weekdays, the take was good near the Champs-Elysées and in the sixteenth arrondissement, but on weekends residents there were too busy shopping to give freely. “Saturdays we’d hit the working districts,” Berteaut wrote. “People there gave less at a time but gave more often.… They gave for pleasure, because they were happy, not just to be charitable.”

  To avoid arrest—street singing wasn’t legal—the girls performed as far away as they could from police stations. When a large crowd gathered around them one day, the local policeman told Edith to move across the road. Then he asked her to sing his favorite—a fantasy of fleeting love called “Le Chaland qui passe” (“The Passing Barge”). Edith’s rendition pleased him. Exclaiming that no one sang of love’s transports the way she did, he gave her five francs.

  On occasions when the girls were hauled off to the station, the police let them go after hearing Edith’s heart-wrenching tales about their impoverished parents and their need to earn money. She was looking after her kid sister, she explained: with no training, all she could do was sing. (Being presented to the authorities as Edith’s sibling no doubt planted the seed that resulted, decades later, in Berteaut’s memoir.)

  Edith also organized performances at the army barracks around Paris. Their mess halls were warm in winter; the soldiers warmed to the girls’ nubile charms. Momone did gymnastics, Edith sang her more risqué songs, they met the men afterward in the local cafés. Though these flirtations made the girls feel “alive,” they didn’t count, Berteaut wrote: “You don’t owe them anything.… You can joke and fool around as much as you please.”

  Edith continued to fool around until she fell in love with a young man named Louis Dupont, known as P’tit Louis. They met in a café in Romainville, a suburb northeast of Paris, where she was performing. Of this meeting she recalled: “He looked me straight in the eye, whistled with admiration, and with a regal flourish put a five-sou coin into my cup.” For the next few days the pleasant-looking youth turned up wherever she was, then proposed that they live together. Louis joined Edith and Momone at the Hôtel de l’Avenir until the couple found an inexpensive furnished room.

  With no kitchen facilities available, they ate from the tin cans that Edith heated on a hot plate. On Sundays they sat on the cheap wooden seats at the local cinema to watch Charlie Chaplin. Louis picked up the necessities for housekeeping on his jobs as a delivery boy, “cutlery or plates or saucepans that he’d stolen from shop displays or at cafés,” Piaf recalled, as if this were the normal way to start life together.

  Edith was sixteen and a half and Louis eighteen when she realized that she was pregnant. She and Momone continued their rounds, often running into Louis on his delivery route. In his view, she should not have been on the streets; sedentary work was more appropriate to someone in her condition, and it would allow them to get rid of Momone. Edith took a job at a boot factory, but when her pregnancy became obvious, the foreman said that he had to let her go. Years later, Piaf told interviewers that she stayed on awhile longer after softening up the foreman with a song. Her brief stint in the factory had shown that she was not meant to be a member of the working class.

  Edith gave birth to a girl on February 11, 1933, at the Tenon Hospital, where she had been born seventeen years earlier. They named the baby Marcelle. P’tit Louis recognized his daughter (he and Edith were not married) and announced her arrival to his “in-laws,” who came to the hospital with presents. When the Gassions learned that no one had thought to acquire a layette, they gave Edith her half sister’s baby clothes. After Louis and Edith went to live with his mother in Romainville, Yeyette visited to show her how to care for the infant—soon known as Cécelle. (In Berteaut’s version of the story, the young couple and Cécelle lived with her.)

  It surprised Edith’s family that she adored her daughter. “She went so far as to breast-feed her and was quite proud of herself,” Denise Gassion recalled. “Her nursing rituals were like going to ma
ss,” she added, “with Edith, the high priestess of love, officiating. No one was allowed to smile.” Berteaut told a different story: she and Edith fed Cécelle milk from bottles, which they rinsed but did not boil because they didn’t know any better. Edith’s real and pretend half sisters agreed that she returned to the streets within a short time, because her earning power was greater than P’tit Louis’s, and because she missed the life.

  “Edith wouldn’t have left the baby behind for anything in the world,” Berteaut explained. Still smarting from Line’s having abandoned her in infancy, she continued to nurse Cécelle, trundling her all over Paris on the Métro. A young Belleville resident who saved coins to toss to her on Sundays recalled the ample bosom and powerful lungs of the little street singer: “She had a voice fit for a cathedral; it seemed to come from far away.… She just stood there, her feet planted on the pavement, and sang anything, from popular songs like Tino Rossi’s ‘Catarinetta’ to masterpieces like ‘Les Deux Ménétriers.’ … The girl who came with her picked up the coins but ‘my singer’ never looked up. She just sang, as if inhabited by the music.”

  By the winter of 1933–34, Piaf was performing as “Miss Edith” in a trio with Camille Ribon and his wife. They toured the army barracks from Clignancourt in the north to Vincennes in the east, L’Ecole Militaire, and, this time under better auspices, Versailles. Despite Edith’s earnings, P’tit Louis was not pleased. Perhaps his pride was hurt. “I felt that something was missing,” Piaf said, “the protective strength of a man, a real man.” Her companion was more like another child.