“This is how Edith thought of creativity,” Hugues Vassal explained. She asked him to capture their ongoing rehearsals with his camera. “The music and lyrics had to wed her personality. That way she could give herself to a song. She also wanted to bring out the best in us, to push us as far as we could go.” Piaf was teaching her collaborators to trust their intuition. “Infallibly she found the movement or the pause that conveyed an emotion. Her gestures were meant to express the soul of a song, to help listeners feel what she felt.” During these late-night rehearsals, members of her entourage were often moved to tears, the photographer added. “She sang from her heart. She gave everything she had.”
Her intimates sensed that they were nourishing her spirit in these exchanges, but other members of Piaf’s court received more than they contributed. Some took advantage of her largesse. Rivgauche recalled the nightly gatherings of “abject beings, people who amused her, pilferers, spongers, those who took her money—a concept that simply didn’t matter to her.” By then, Edith had replaced Momone with a group of courtiers who were allowed to manipulate her even when she knew they were not acting in her best interest.
What mattered most to the star was to think that she was well enough to resume her career. In November, she undertook a string of engagements that would land her back in the hospital. For the rest of the year, reporters followed Piaf’s every move in their zeal to stoke the public’s fascination with what was said to be her final tour. Having transcended her status in the press as a man-eater (“une mangeuse d’hommes”) to become a national treasure, she would, from this point on, be subjected to endless intrusions into what remained of her private life.
Piaf’s comeback began on November 20 in Melun, when she introduced two new songs, “Ouragan” and “C’est l’amour.” Marlene Dietrich, who had just arrived in France, came to see her sing; her friend’s presence seemed like a good omen. Piaf toured the north of France for two weeks without incident until Maubeuge, where she left the stage after forgetting the words to two songs. The doctor who was summoned advised her to cancel. She objected, “If I can’t keep singing, … I’ll never be able to believe in myself.” Barrier let her continue, against his better judgment. Despite the tonic effect of the next song, “Milord,” her voice failed before she reached the end. The press was told that her malaise had been caused by an overdose of barbiturates; no one let on that she was again relying on a cocktail of different drugs in large doses.
Accounts of what was now called Piaf’s “suicide tour” appeared in the popular press, accompanied by photographs of her swollen face. Pierre Desgraupes, the host of a popular television program, came to Dieppe to interview her on December 11 amid rumors of her impending death. He began by asking if she could imagine not singing. “No,” she replied. It was the only thing that made her happy: without it she would kill herself. She had to keep performing to get well. To the extent of disobeying doctors’ orders? Desgraupes asked. “That’s all I do,” Piaf replied. “I disobey everyone.” Changing the subject, the host asked why she could not bear to be alone. Because of ghosts from the past who came to haunt her, she murmured; asked who they were, she declined to give their names.
Two days later, at Dreux, her face was even more swollen, her hands knotted with arthritis, and she could barely talk. Lucien Vaimber, a doctor of chiropractic known for his success with extreme cases, was called in. Although he too advised her to cancel, Piaf insisted on appearing that night. Gripping the microphone for support, she sang eight songs and collapsed. As the star was carried from the theater, many in the audience burst into tears, certain that they would never see her again.
Piaf was again hospitalized in Paris—her treatment a sleep cure and vitamin injections. The staff refused all visitors until December 19, her forty-fourth birthday. She went home on Christmas Eve but returned a week later with severe jaundice, then spent January 1960 in the American Hospital. Although she insisted that she would recover in time for her Olympia engagement that spring, Paris Match began publishing illustrated chapters in “the novel of a life”—her own. “The subject of her songs is her life,” the editors wrote. “Interpreting the world of suffering and romance, she bears witness to it, like a Victor Hugo heroine.”
During the time Edith remained in hospital, the growing malaise over the government’s handling of the civil war in Algeria (technically part of France) had assumed crisis proportions. Since 1958, when De Gaulle returned as the head of the Fifth Republic after a group of officers led a coup in Algiers in support of “Algérie française” (Algeria under French rule), civil unrest over the conduct of the war had dominated public awareness. Debates over what it meant to be French given the demise of the country’s former rule in Indochina and perhaps in North Africa were carried on daily. Cultural events, including songs, were seen in relation to their political implications, or the views of their performers.
In the hospital, Piaf may have been unaware of De Gaulle’s January 29 address to the nation in support of his policy—Algerian self-rule following the restoration of order, a plan that would meet with violent resistance. For the next six months, she spent most of her time recuperating in the country with Rivgauche, Léveillée, the Bonels, and the few members of her entourage who had not jumped ship during her suicide tour. Believing in the power of the mind to overcome physical frailty, she exhorted herself in her notebooks: “No more injections!” “Don’t let yourself go physically.” “See only those who bring you comfort and spiritual enrichment.” And, touchingly, “Give up passions that harm you, renounce your desires, try to rediscover yourself.” She must reread her Rosicrucian texts for support. Edith’s morale strengthened over these months, because she knew that her compatriots looked to her as an example, and because her friends made it their business to help her get well.
During this time, Piaf worked with Rivgauche and Léveillée on the libretto of a “comédie-ballet” called La Voix, an homage to her by the choreographer Pierre Lacotte—who would become a specialist in the reconstruction of forgotten ballets. Lacotte imagined a play in which Edith would be heard but not seen while presiding over the action like a benevolent spirit: La Voix featured dances set to the songs she was to sing celebrating the streets of Paris, the newspaper kiosks, the Métro (“a fantastic basilica”), and the city’s opportunities for just strolling around. “There was a pas de deux to be danced by a couple who were watched over by Piaf’s character,” Rivgauche recalled. Piaf had Léveillée play the music again and again while she mimed the pas de deux with her fingers: “It was ridiculous and touching at the same time. Those two poor deformed fingers trying to represent the man and the woman in all their lightness.”
“Non, la vie n’est pas triste: (“No, Life Isn’t Sad”), a song she wrote for La Voix, may have boosted her own morale. To find happiness, she advised, “Il suffirait de tendre la main / Tu trouverais combien de copains.” (“Just hold out your hand / You’ll find so many friends.”) The joy of collaborating on a new art form lifted her spirits. Though the project was shelved (La Voix would be shown on French television after her death), it served the purpose of immersing the star in the ether of artistic creation, her natural habitat.
Another intimate, Claude Figus, also helped Piaf look on the bright side. His position as her new court jester gave him a license to misbehave, an aspect of his character that had first won him notoriety in the homosexual world of Paris nightlife. After penetrating Piaf’s circle through his ties to Cocteau’s lover Jean Marais and the actor Jean-Claude Brialy, another of her admirers, Figus decided that he too wanted to sing. Edith made him her secretary, despite his aversion to discipline, a decision she would regret when his memoir of life at the Boulevard Lannes was published in Ici Paris, a gossip sheet devoted to the lives of the stars.
Although Edith was not yet ready for the Olympia, she recorded several new songs in May. In “Cri du coeur” (lyrics by the poet Jacques Prévert), she is once again a street singer who warbles like a bird: “C
’est la voix d’un oiseau craintif / La voix d’un moineau mort de froid / Sur le pavé d’la rue d’la joie / Et toujours, toujours quand je chante / Cet oiseau chante avec moi.” (“It’s the voice of a timid bird / The voice of a sparrow that died of cold / Where the streetwalkers are bold / And whenever I sing / That sparrow sings with me.”)
Despite Piaf’s hoarse tone and unsteadiness when she recorded “Ouragan,” Rivgauche’s torrential hymn to love, the composer told her, “You gave me such joy yesterday.… What a triumph! I’m happy and proud to have written [these words] when I hear you sing them.” In spite of everything, she still believed in love, she told a visitor. It was “the most beautiful, the greatest, the truest of human emotions,” but lovers should be indulgent with each other: “It’s too easy to think you’re always right.”
On June 2, the star woke in the night with acute stomach pain. She was again rushed to the American Hospital, where she went into a coma caused by acute liver damage. “It is hard to say whether Edith Piaf will recover this time,” her doctor declared. “It depends on her liver, which has all but failed.… Her system can’t tolerate the medicines she must have taken for years.” After emerging from the coma she remained in hospital until the end of August. Barrier canceled her summer tour and sold her country house to pay her bills. When she could be moved, he took her to his family home to recover; there she succumbed to dysentery and could not leave her bed. In desperation, Danielle Bonel asked Dr. Vaimber to treat her. The chiropractor had Danielle brew a tea of dandelion leaves: this bitter concoction and his gentle realignment of Piaf’s spine stopped the dysentery and allowed her to walk again.
By early October, Piaf was well enough to return to Paris but had not yet regained her voice. In the hope that she might sing again, she obeyed Vaimber’s orders: to avoid all drugs, follow her diet, and continue their treatments, though chiropractic was not recognized by the medical establishment. Vaimber, one of a few to practice this technique in France, had to be careful; his patient’s fame meant that he could not make a mistake. He came to treat her every other day. On his recommendation, she took royal jelly—which would become known in France as the remedy that had “saved” Piaf. Despite her suffering, she insisted that she had no regrets: “If I had to live my life over again, I’d do it just the same.”
October 24 marked a turning point in Edith’s revival. That day, the lyricist Michel Vaucaire and the composer Charles Dumont came to the Boulevard Lannes. Having refused their efforts in the past, she claimed to dislike Dumont, who had written for Juliette Gréco. That evening, after a session with Vaimber, she canceled her appointments and went to bed. Changing her mind when she heard that the composers were there, she agreed to hear one of their songs.
Dumont sat down at the piano and spoke the lyrics. “Non, rien de rien,” he began, “Non, je ne regrette rien,” with the accent on the long, repeated “non.” The song’s defiant opening (which seemed to echo Piaf’s aside about having no regrets) caught her attention. After the bold affirmation of the penultimate strophe “Je repars à zero” (“I’m starting all over again”), she asked to hear it once more.
That night, which continued until dawn, Dumont played “Non, je ne regrette rien” more than twenty times for Edith’s intimates—Monnot, Chauvigny, Suzanne Flon, the Bonels, Figus, the household staff, and Bruno Coquatrix, who was summoned to hear it at 4 a.m. Knowing that he was close to financial ruin, Piaf told Coquatrix to reserve the Olympia for her at the end of the year. She would do her best to save the theater now that she had the song she had been waiting for. Dumont could not believe what had taken place. Piaf’s friends called it a miracle, her resuscitation through music.
“My life changed overnight,” Dumont recalled. “It was just as Edith said: my song conquered the world.” She recorded “Non, je ne regrette rien” five days later, and with his help began planning her program for the Olympia. It would be the occasion to highlight her savior’s music. Vaucaire wrote lyrics for one of Dumont’s old melodies: renamed “Mon Dieu,” it joined her new repertoire, as did “Mon Vieux Lucien,” composed in honor of Dr. Vaimber. With Dumont, Edith wrote two new songs, “T’es l’homme qu’il me faut” and “La Belle Histoire d’amour,” the latter in memory of Cerdan. Of the thirteen songs in her program, the majority would be the work of her new favorite. Piaf told Monnot that she would have to omit most of her songs to make room for Dumont’s, which had brought her back to life. Guite was deeply hurt, some said heartbroken, to find herself on the sidelines after nearly twenty-five years of collaboration with Edith.
Piaf spoke again with Pierre Desgraupes, almost a year after their first interview, when all France had thought that she was dying.
Though it had been a mistake to continue her “suicide tour,” she had needed to go right to the end: “I always go right to the end,” she said with a smile. “I thought I would die but I wasn’t afraid. It was almost a relief, because I thought I couldn’t keep singing. Life no longer interested me.… There is love, perhaps, but love without singing, that’s no good. Nor is singing without love.” Now she felt apprehensive about facing the public. Once onstage, Desgraupes observed, she was a different woman. “I don’t belong to myself when I sing,” Piaf agreed. “I’m in an altered state.” Their interview ended with a stirring rendition of “Non, je ne regrette rien” for the television audience—for the occasion, the beloved toi of the final line, “Ça commence avec toi.”
Piaf’s intimates rallied to give her support at this crucial moment. After Cocteau heard her broadcast, he told his nightingale that she had inspired him not to despair in a dark time (he was alluding to the news from Algeria, where French officers had tried to bring down De Gaulle). The poet was in awe of her bravery—“your strong heart saves you each time that death wants you … Your faithful heart nourishes your voice, enchants the young couples who listen to you hand in hand and the solitaries like myself who keep singing despite the terrible news.” He told her she must take care of herself, “so you can astonish us with the great organ sounds that emerge from your fragility.”
Decades later, it may be hard to imagine the reverence with which Piaf’s return to the stage was greeted in 1960. To her contemporaries, it was a triumph of the French spirit, embodied in their little sparrow’s revival and her resolve to save the Olympia. Coquatrix spoke for many in his open letter of gratitude: “At this sad time, when passion, enthusiasm, and magnificence are rare, how good it is to be present at this triumphant resurrection, above all the triumph of the individual.” Rather than praise Piaf’s art, he chose “to honor your courage, your faith, your love of God, of life, and of people.” In a similar vein, a journalist who interviewed Edith before her opening turned to religious language to explain her role at a time of unrest: she was a modern Mary Magdalene, a penitent whose illness had brought her close to the divine, a believer whose art had made her its vessel. Like a latter-day Joan of Arc, she seemed “to be setting out on a long crusade.”
On December 30, opening night, thousands of ticket holders (including government ministers and army generals) waited for hours before being ushered into the Olympia. Shortly before Edith was to go on, Danielle helped her into her old Balmain dress and combed her thinning auburn frizz. Barrier and Dumont stood on either side of her to calm her stage fright. Before going on, she danced the samba with Coquatrix, crossed herself, and walked to the microphone while the orchestra played “Hymne à l’amour.” For the next fifteen minutes, the audience applauded nonstop. When their cheers (“We love you, Edith,” “Salut, ma belle”) died down, she launched into the waltzing rhythms of “Les Mots d’amour,” by Rivgauche and Dumont. By the end of the song, which projects an ecstatic vision of love pouring through a multitude of voices—“ta voix / Ma voix, ou d’autres voix / C’est la voix de l’amour”—the crowd was rapt, in a kind of lay communion, with the star as celebrant.
For a change of pace, she sang Dumont’s “Les Flons-flons du bal,” a lighter tune contrasting the d
ance hall’s “tra-la-las” to love’s sorrows. The crowd gasped when Piaf sang “J’ai bien failli mourir” (“I almost died”), but at the last lines, on the world’s lack of interest in our tears (“C’est chacun pour soi / C’est tant pis pour moi”), they applauded her bracing appeal to the je-m’en-foutisme (“don’t give a damn” spirit) of French culture—its tough-minded refusal of sentimentality. The rest of the program went smoothly, until Piaf stumbled over the words of “Mon Vieux Lucien.” Telling the audience that she would start again, the star reverted to her prewar, titi accent to suit the tune’s java lilt and faubourien tale of mateship.
Next came the show-stopper, “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Piaf’s coiled vibrato and alliterative rolled “r”s underscored the opening’s triple negatives (“non, je ne regrette rien”). At first the accompaniment was restrained to let her voice ring out: “Je me fous du passé,” she cried defiantly: “I don’t give a damn about the past.” Then the orchestra swelled to enhance the final line, “Ça commence avec toi”: “It all starts with you.” The audience applauded wildly. She was singing for all who believed that old amours could be transcended and sorrows overcome—that what counted in life was a resilient heart.
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