No Regrets

by Carolyn Burke

  After her triumphant Bastille Day show in the provincial town of Tulle (in Corrèze, central France), the couple took a brief vacation at the Château de Lafont in Chenevelles. This estate belonged to the family of Edith’s new pianist, Max d’Yresnes, whose mother received paying guests. Engagements in Geneva, Deauville, Ostende, and Brussels took up the rest of the summer until it became obvious that, having worked continuously since the New Year (sometimes with two gigs a day), Edith needed a rest.

  Asso arranged for her to return by herself to the château in September. The political situation had been tense since Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March. When it became clear that he planned to do the same in the Sudetenland, two and a half million Frenchmen, all those under the age of sixty, were mobilized. Meanwhile, the Popular Front government had collapsed. The new government, under Edmond Daladier, temporized, while Neville Chamberlain sought peace at any price with Germany.

  Since Asso controlled all aspects of Edith’s career, including the purse strings, she wrote to ask him for funds to buy fabric for a dress, adding that the seamstress would charge very little to make it. In another letter, she expressed her lack of ease with her hostess, who treated her like a child, and her concern for the future, her own and that of France. “What news of the war?” she asked. “If things go badly, I won’t have a penny, no one to take me in. I’d be in bad shape. I spoke a lot about this at dinner yesterday. No one said a word. I’m really disgusted with the people here.”

  She had only her faith to rely on, the simple spirituality to which she turned when in crisis. One day at church she prayed to the figure of Jesus on the cross: “I cried a lot and then I talked. I said to him, ‘Don’t let this war happen.’ Then I looked at his feet, his hands, his face full of suffering. Finally, I thought about everything he had endured without holding it against anyone.” Still, she was afraid—of the poison gas the Germans were said to be stocking, “afraid of Paris, of everything … a huge anxiety in my heart.” She blamed herself for her misery and that of the world. “God gave me everything and I’m destroying my own happiness.… The earth is full of filth like me. That’s why there are wars.”

  Asso’s letters did not always bring the comfort she sought. Edith’s vulnerability is evident in her reply to one that denounced her faults. “My dear love,” she wrote, “how much it must have cost you to write such awful things. But you’re right, I’m stupid. I always told you I was, and you tried to convince me that I was intelligent. Besides, the fact that I did all those dumb things before I met you only proves my lack of intelligence. It’s time I made amends to all the people I hurt through the years.… But you’re going too far to say all the things you said in your letter. I hate myself, I have no confidence in myself whatsoever.” (She nonetheless found the strength to say that she disliked Max d’Yresnes’s music for Asso’s latest song. “I told him so,” she wrote, “and he didn’t like it at all.”)

  Edith returned to Paris on September 30, the day that Daladier signed the Munich Pact, which appeared to have purchased peace by ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. The French gave Daladier a hero’s welcome and went back to work under the illusion that war had been prevented. For the next few months, the Germans mobilized to occupy Czechoslovakia while the French censors kept worrisome news out of the papers.

  Edith began preparing for two important engagements—top billing at the Européen from October 21 to 27, and, the following week, at the Bobino Theater in Montparnasse. Asso hired a young woman named Suzanne Flon (soon to be a well-known actress) as her secretary, though Piaf later joked that Suzanne’s real job was to keep an eye on her.

  The actress appreciated her charge’s gaiety. Each day, when she arrived to find Edith doing her exercises, the singer dictated several lines of the songs she had begun composing, and Suzanne typed them with two fingers. Edith was also writing a novel about a working-class woman’s life, which did not go beyond the first few pages. When her new friend left to pursue her acting career, Edith gave her an autographed photo of herself that read, “For Suzanne, who doesn’t type very well, who isn’t a very good secretary, but whom I love very much just the same.”

  Even though Edith’s schedule of recording sessions, radio programs, and singing engagements left little time for friendship, she found relief from Asso’s watchfulness with his collaborator, Marguerite Monnot. Piaf later called the woman she nicknamed Guite “my best friend and, of all the women in the world, the one I admire the most.” In her view the musician was “the living incarnation of the art.” It was all the more remarkable that, having been a child prodigy who gave piano concerts throughout Europe, Monnot had abandoned her classical career to write songs like “L’Etranger,” which had brought them together. Guite’s tales of her upbringing—her parents both taught music; friends came to their house each night to play and sing—would have enchanted Edith, who admired those who grew up with a knowledge of the arts. But their friendship was complicated by Guite’s artistic partnership with Asso in these years, when they were creating the repertoire that built Piaf’s reputation.

  After her successful engagements at the Européen and the Bobino that autumn, Edith recovered sufficiently from her self-doubt to ask Asso about the terms of her contracts—a matter she had, until then, left to him. He took her questions as a sign of her desire for greater freedom. Manipulating her feelings of gratitude, he pleaded for one more year of obedience—after which she could go her own way. “I think you would be wrong to want to free yourself completely,” he told her, “but I will accept what you decide.”

  During this time Edith turned to Jacques Bourgeat for advice. She found respite with him outside Paris, in the Vallée de Chevreuse, where the two friends often spent weekends walking, reading, and sitting in companionable silence. “Far from the noise, far from the world,” Bourgeat wrote, “with only a pile of books for company … an old man and a young girl recall memories and measure the paths they have trod. It’s a time devoted to study. From the writings of Sainte-Beuve they learn about those great figures of French literature who came to the region, whose spirits linger there”—Ronsard, Molière, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine. “Even Plato has followed the hermits there, with his Apology and Banquet under his arm,” Bourgeat continued. “What a noble company! And how dear those evenings before the fire we build to gaze upon while Piaf draws from these books the treasures of knowledge.”

  By the end of the year, when Edith turned twenty-three, it may have struck her that, unlike Bourgeat, Asso asked more than he gave in return. In his own account of this period, the composer had become her “moral jailer”—talking her into submission to his regime by claiming that it was for her own good. Years later, he said that he had “committed professional suicide” to devote himself to Edith. She remained faithful to him, despite the tensions in their partnership. But by the spring of 1939, when Edith was again performing almost nonstop, his vision of her as his creation had become too constraining.

  Reviewing Piaf’s April engagement at the Européen, the critic Léon-Martin said that her place in the music world was now established. He noted the presence in the audience of groups of mobilized soldiers on leave. Perhaps they saw themselves in Asso’s characters, his devil-may-care legionnaires. Though there was not yet a distinctive Piaf sound, audiences liked programs in which Asso’s réaliste songs and evocations of exotic lands were interspersed with lighter numbers that showed off Piaf’s talent as a comédienne and, as her tone became less nasal, the increased richness and roundness of her voice.

  Edith’s Cyrano was mobilized in August, when she was singing in Deauville. While Asso joined his unit in the French Alps, she continued her tour to Ostende, Brussels, and back to Deauville, by which time the Germans and the Soviets had concluded a Nonaggression Treaty. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. On September 3, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. As France entered the period known as la drôle de guerre—the funny, or phony, war—Edith continued to sing the song
s that Asso had written for her. But she had turned the page on their relationship, perhaps without even knowing it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1939–1942

  For the rest of the year, the French pretended that nothing much had happened. Germany was not ready for combat, they insisted; in the event of an invasion, France would be safe behind the reinforced Maginot Line. Parisian nightspots, which had closed for three weeks following the declaration of war, reopened in late September. “We understood that terrible things were happening in Poland and Austria,” Maurice Chevalier recalled, “but Parisians don’t really care about anything but Paris.” He added, “I guess we feel that we are doing our share by giving laughter and gaiety to the nation.”

  Piaf’s war years began with engagements at Le Night Club, an American-style cabaret near the Arc de Triomphe, and the Européen, in the Place Clichy, where soldiers on leave called out for their favorite songs. On October 29, before her Night Club gig, she did a benefit with Charles Trenet in aid of the first French prisoners. Though she claimed not to know much about politics, songs like “Le Fanion de la légion” (which glorified the French Foreign Legion, symbolized by their flag) seemed to take on new meaning in the phony war. But, like Chevalier, she was just doing her share. “My job is to sing,” she insisted, “to sing whatever happens!”

  As rumors of peace settlements circulated, only to be denied the next day, Edith kept in touch with Asso. Describing her December opening at the Etoile-Palace in a letter, she praised his new composition, “Je n’en connais pas la fin” (“I Don’t Know What the End Will Be,” an ironic title given the political situation). “It’s better than anything you’ve done till now,” she wrote. “It’ll be my big hit.” Above all, she was stunned by her own success: “a full house every night.”

  Edith’s letters did not mention the changes in her life since Asso’s mobilization. Unable to tolerate being alone, she got back in touch with Momone, who moved into his room at the Alsina. The two friends began carousing and carrying on all night in Pigalle after Edith’s performances—until she met the man who would take Asso’s place and, as he had done, remove her from Momone’s influence.

  Late one evening, the entertainer Paul Meurisse went to Le Night Club, near where he was performing, to have a look at the former Môme Piaf. Knowing her reputation as a réaliste singer with a streetwise accent, he was impressed by the silence: “not a word,” he noted, “not even the clink of bottles, the sound of the maître d’ filling glasses.” All eyes were on the little figure at the end of the room: “Through the magic of her voice, she turned these customers into spectators. They were enchanted.” As was Meurisse. “She was radiant, as if she had stepped out of an El Greco painting,” he continued. When Edith turned up beside him at the bar, they began a flirtation that led to their polishing off a bottle of champagne at his garconnière.

  Meurisse was so smitten that he wanted to move in with her, despite the great differences in their backgrounds. “Edith Piaf doesn’t live at Paul Meurisse’s,” she protested. The son of a banker who had broken with his family after winning a singing contest, the dapper twenty-eight-year-old joined her and Momone in Pigalle, then quickly found a solution for himself and Edith—a furnished apartment near the Arc de Triomphe.

  The couple moved in together, engaging a cook (it was unthinkable for Edith to prepare meals) and a secretary (whose main job was to open correspondence). From then on, she would forsake the rougher parts of Paris for the beaux quartiers, the fashionable areas near the Champs-Elysées where she had once sung for the spare change she received from well-heeled passersby.

  Meurisse was not the only spectator to be enchanted by Edith that season. In November, a Spanish journalist wrote an account of Le Night Club’s beguiling songstress: “She makes her way among the tables and steps onto the stage without a smile or a bow.… Her voice, full of a gravity that becomes profound, raises the curtain on scenes that are highly picturesque, but terribly sad.” Though she seemed about to burst into tears, Piaf remained silent at the end of each number while the audience clapped wildly. In his view, Asso’s songs suited her because they shared “the realism of a tormented life, of loneliness, of an errant, unprotected destiny.”

  In private, Edith showed a great deal more joie de vivre than onstage, Meurisse noted. Social opposites, they were astonished to find themselves together but shared the same desire to laugh. An occasion presented itself during their first week at the Alsina, when Piaf heard a familiar knock at the door. Asso was in Paris on leave; Meurisse just managed to slip into Momone’s room. His memoirs restage this scene as French farce, giving Edith the classic line “Ciel! Mon mari!” (“Heavens! My husband!”), and crediting Asso with the last laugh—the next day, the jilted composer came to his rival’s club to say that he should not leave telltale cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Asso “withdrew without any fuss,” Meurisse wrote, underestimating his predecessor’s hard feelings.

  Meurisse also recalled Edith’s delight as she toured their new apartment. She had seen bourgeois dwellings before, but never had one to herself, with a dining room, a large bathroom, guest rooms, and a grand piano in the salon. “I won’t have to go to the composers’ any more,” she exulted; “they can come to me!”

  The couple made efforts to adapt to each other. Although Edith liked to ridicule middle-class propriety, she accepted customs like letting the man pull out her chair or help her into her coat. Meurisse exercised tact when teaching her not to mistake a finger bowl for a palate cleanser. Her more outrageous gaffes made them laugh, especially when she repeated them deliberately, to thumb her nose at stuffy guests. “It wasn’t so much that le savoir-vivre was imposed on her,” Meurisse wrote; “rather, that she imposed herself on le savoir-vivre.”

  Meurisse was awed by Piaf’s professionalism. She rehearsed all night without complaint. “She would laugh and begin again,” he recalled; songwriters had to keep up with her. If a novice had a glimmer of an idea, she refused to let him go until it came to fruition. “Over and over, she interrupted meals to force the writer back to the piano.… I never saw Piaf in a bad mood because hours and hours of work hadn’t produced anything.” But she was pitiless when a song was not quite right: “In her work, as in her life, her ability to put the past behind her went beyond anything a dictator might have attempted.” The one exception to her dictatorial ways was her friendship with Marguerite Monnot, whom she admired “as one admires perfection.”

  Meurisse was pleased when Piaf broke her contract at Le Night Club to join him at his cabaret. She also took on the role of artistic mentor, doing so as mercilessly as Asso had done with her. Her lover’s routine was “shit,” she told him. Given Meurisse’s character—aloof and patronizing—he should try for a comic effect by underscoring the contrast between his silly songs and his natural hauteur with grandiose orchestral settings. “Idiotic words supported by orchestrations meant to be played in cathedrals” broke the rules, but it worked. Meurisse credited his success to Piaf’s musical intelligence.

  By the new year, Edith was contemplating changes in her own routine. She already knew the Russian-born composer Michel Emer, whose songs for Lucienne Boyer and Maurice Chevalier had been well received, although Edith thought them too sentimental. Emer turned up late one night in February 1940 with a tune that he had composed for her: having just been mobilized, he had to join his unit the next day. Piaf listened to the first stanza—“La fille de joie est belle / Au coin d’la rue là-bas / Elle a une clientèle / Qui lui remplit son bas.” (“The lady of the night is belle / Over there on the street corner / She has a clientele / Who keep her pockets full.”) She knew right away that she wanted the song (which would become “L’Accordéoniste”) for her next engagement at the Bobino Theater.

  Emer’s tale of the prostitute whose dream of starting afresh ends with the death of her lover (an accordionist turned soldier) resembled Asso’s songs for Piaf yet marked a new, more deeply expressive, stage in her performances—
an opportunity to coordinate voice, hands, and stage presence to underline the song’s pathos. That night, because Emer had not thought how she was to perform the final lines, “ARRETEZ! / Arrêtez la musique!” (“STOP! Stop the music”), she made him stay until they found the solution. The orchestra would stop abruptly and she would sing them a cappella.

  Emer prolonged his departure to see Piaf introduce his song on opening night, February 16. After several numbers by Asso and Monnot, she launched into “L’Accordéoniste.” With the first refrain—“Ça lui rentre dans la peau / Par le bas, par le haut / Elle a envie de chanter … / … C’est une vraie tordue de la musique” (“[The music] gets under her skin / From her head to her toes / She feels like singing … / … She’s just nuts about music”)—she ran her hands up and down her slender form. Until then, Piaf had held her hands at her sides. Now they enacted her possession by the music, her abandonment to it. With a minimum of gestures, she sketched the fille de joie’s bliss, then her unbearable sorrow.

  Piaf’s intensity is still palpable in recordings of ‘L’Accordéoniste,” especially the wrenching sob of the last lines. “The response was delirious,” Emer recalled. Piaf asked the composer to come onstage and introduced him as a soldier about to go to the front; the crowd applauded all over again. He and Piaf became close friends; he would write many of her favorite songs. “Her kindness to me was outstanding,” Emer said years later. Though she was despotic in rehearsals, she would always go out of her way to help him.

  At twenty-four, the diminutive singer already had a commanding presence—often too commanding, especially when she broke all the dishes during an argument to provoke a reaction from her lover. (Meurisse bought more china at the Galeries Lafayette, knowing that Edith was likely to smash it as well.) “Living with him changed the way I looked at life,” she told a reporter. “His indolent courtesy was so completely different from all the rogues I had known in Montmartre … that I soon fell in love with his face, that of the favorite child. It bore no relation to my old ideas of the perfect man but opened the doors to a world of refinement, whose existence I had never imagined.”