The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Mistinguett (née Jeanne Bourgeois, 1875–1956) had no particular voice, either, but that did not stop her from becoming the single greatest singing star in the period between the wars, virtually personifying Paris itself. La Miss, as she was invariably known, began as a comic singer at the Eldorado before the turn of the century, became a very early screen comedienne (she made no fewer than forty-five silent films, but only two sound pictures), and was often partnered onstage by men who carried the melody, most memorably Maurice Chevalier, with whom her offstage partnership lasted a decade. Despite her general-audiences sheen, Mistinguett could nevertheless chirp the masochistic tango “Mon homme” (1920), which Carco saw as emblematic of java culture: “He beats me up, / He takes my money, / I’m at the end, / But despite it all, / What do you want? / He’s so far under my skin.”

  Fréhel as Pervenche, 1908

  There were numerous other women in those same years who sang of Paris and the streets, of hunger and prostitution and the guillotine. There was Berthe Sylva (1885–1941), who anticipated Fréhel in many ways but lacked the latter’s impeccable taste in material. There was Yvonne George (1896–1930), who inspired dozens of poems by Robert Desnos, and of whom Janet Flanner wrote, “She was ephemeral. She could magnetize only small groups; before the great audiences of the Palace, the Olympia, and the bigger music halls, she failed—usually magnificently.” Although she was a heavy user of opium and cocaine, what killed her early was tuberculosis. Her recordings are exceedingly hard to find today, even in their single CD reissue, but they are worth seeking out.

  Mistinguett at the Eldorado, circa 1900

  There was Emma Liebel (Aimée Médebielle, 1873–1928), who made a great many records but has been unjustly forgotten because of her death just before the big realist surge—either from tuberculosis or from having her throat slit by a lover, depending on which account you read. There were Marie Dubas, Germaine Lix, Lucienne Boyer, Lucienne Delyle, Nitta-Jo, Yvonne Printemps, La Palma, the deep-voiced and broad-shouldered Suzy Solidor, and Lys Gauty, whose hit “Le chaland qui passe” was slapped onto the soundtrack of Jean Vigo’s L’ Atalante (1934). There was Florelle (Odette Rousseau, 1898–1974), who was better known as a movie star than a singer, but who was nevertheless a remarkable singer. She was Kurt Weill’s choice to play Polly Peachum in the French version (in the early sound era they often made versions of movies in different languages, often with different casts) of G. W. Pabst’s film adaptation of The Threepenny Opera (1931), over the director’s initial reservations—and no wonder, since her voice has grit reminiscent of his wife Lotte Lenya’s. Much like her characters in many movies, she is trilling and flirtatious on the surface, but has a rough, deep bottom range. Her “Pirate Jenny” can stand with the best of them. She first appeared onstage at the age of four, had speaking parts at fourteen, made movies for forty years. She was capable of playing romantic leads well into middle age—no small achievement for the time—for example, in Jean Renoir’s Le crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), where she plays the quintessential Parisian washerwoman with an extraordinary combination of sexual knowingness, calculating intelligence, and openhearted generosity.

  Florelle, circa 1930

  And then there was Damia (Marie-Louise Damien, 1889–1978), perhaps the greatest singer of them all. A native-born Parisian, she ran away from home in her early teens, was saved from starving by the kind ministrations of a street prostitute, passed from theater extra to music hall attraction in a blink. She was cast as the typical midinette (shopgirl) in her simple black dress, ran with Fréhel when the latter was still known as Pervenche, and indulged in all the drugs and excesses of the time. Then, in the 1920s she reinvented her persona, transcending the street in her visual expression and sometimes in the content of her songs. She kept the black dress but cut it down to a simple sheath, darkened her eyes with kohl and accentuated her extraordinarily wide mouth with red lipstick—scuttlebutt had it she also whitened her arms with flour—and stripped the stage and took the lighting down to a single spot, sometimes colored, depending on the specific song.* She made only the most minimal, stark, expressionistic gestures, suggesting the words rather than describing them. “Her face and arms often foretold what her voice would say—the same theatrical technique employed by Maria Callas.” Many of those decisions later became commonplace for torch singers, but no one else was employing them at the time. Damia was unquestionably a diva, with a significant gay and lesbian constituency; Jean Genet in fact acknowledged her as the model for Divine, the transvestite protagonist of his Our Lady of the Flowers (1943).

  She was also an auteur, which is to say that her interpretations of songs were so definitive, so lapidary that it was as if she had written them herself; if they had previously been sung by others, she utterly transformed them. She could go the populist route, with accordions and lyrics about guinguettes and mussels and beer, but her primary note was classical and tragic—not for nothing was she called la tragédienne de la chanson. She was no intellectual, but her taste was unassailable, as was her intuition. She commissioned music to “La veuve,” a poem written in 1887 by Jules Jouy, anarchist contributor to Le Chat Noir, about the guillotine (the widow). “Stretching her long red arms, / Pretty and freshened up, / She awaits her new husband— / The widow … Because her lovers, voracious, / Killed on their very first turn, / Only sleep once with / The widow.” She sang about drowned sailors (“Les goélands”); about a madman who kills a child, told from his point of view (“Le fou”); about a woman whose sailor husband is on his way to Tahiti and who prays to the Virgin that, rather than let him be seduced by the native women, She cause his ship to be dashed upon the rocks (“La mauvaise prière”).

  Damia at her peak, early 1930s

  Perhaps her single greatest number is a fatalistic love song, “La chaîne” (L. Daniderff, E. Ronn)—not exactly banal in its essence but also not untypical of its time—which starkly illustrates how completely she could transform her material. First of all, she pays no attention to the time signature as written; she stretches some words and phrases out well past their allotted beat and ruthlessly clips others, depending on their emotional weight. She proclaims some phrases and slips others into parentheses, launches an attack at the start of some measures and lets others trail off. She slides and slurs her intonation for emphasis, employs her rolled r’s like a sort of castanet percussion. She continually destabilizes the listener, forcing attention to every word, pitching her craft on emotionally storm-tossed seas, manufacturing a kind of suspense that’s not in the lyrics. She uses the nasality inherent in French as a mournful continuo; her slurred notes are kin to Billie Holiday’s. And even in her darkest songs she can make a rising inflection transcend all the bitterness and sorrow and squalor, as if she could see over the horizon into some better world. She lived to a very old age, although she barely recorded or performed after the Second World War.

  Lyric sheet for “La veuve,” by Jules Jouy, 1887

  Part of the problem was a young upstart, La Môme Piaf, later Édith Piaf (Édith Giovanna Gassion, 1915–1963), a generation younger than many of these women, who emerged seemingly from nowhere in the late 1930s and, unlike any of them, became an international star. Her mother had been a singer who sang at the Chat Noir and other Montmartre joints of the fin-de-siècle and on the streets, but who had let herself go; according to the few who heard them both, Édith inherited her mother’s voice. She began singing on the streets when she was fifteen, accompanied by her half sister and alter ego, Simone Berteaut; had a child at seventeen who died two years later; was discovered on a corner by the club owner Louis Leplée in 1935. Leplée groomed her, gave her her name (piaf is argot for “sparrow”), assembled a repertoire for her (she had primarily been singing Fréhel’s songs). Less than two years later Leplée was murdered, possibly by a trick—the case was never solved—but Piaf, who had already released her first record, was on her way. She had immediate and extraordinary luck in finding collaborators, in particular t
he lyricist Raymond Asso (who wrote, among many other things, “Mon légionnaire,” an enormous hit for Piaf that was also recorded by half the singers in Paris) and the composer Marguerite Monnot, who wrote the music to “Mon légionnaire” and thirty other songs for Piaf, stretching the whole length of her career. Piaf wrote the words to eight of these, making Monnot-Piaf the very first female composer-lyricist team in the history of French popular music.

  In the beginning Piaf was unsurprisingly raw and unsophisticated, and her repertoire of the 1930s showcases her breathlessness, her naïveté, her street urchin credentials, even as it cannot help emphasizing her huge debts to Fréhel, Damia, Berthe Sylva, Marie Dubas, and others. Simone Berteaut’s biography* has the author upbraiding Piaf, her half sister, for her lack of polish:

  I’ll tell you what she’s doing there, Marie Dubas. If you talk to her about Baudelaire she doesn’t ask you for his phone number so he can write her a song. If a man kisses her hand she doesn’t slap him with it right after. If you serve her fish she doesn’t eat the bones or spit them out on her plate because she doesn’t know what to do with them. If you introduce her to a cabinet minister she doesn’t ask him, “How’s business?”

  But she learned as she went along, at least as a musical artist. Her private life—which was barely private, not even so much because the press hounded her as because she herself continually broadcast every passing emotion as if it were a historical watershed—was a succession of infatuations, sprees, breakdowns, jags, detoxes, crises, illnesses, tragedies; the death in 1949 in a plane crash of the boxer Marcel Cerdan, perhaps the love of her life, as he was coming to meet her in New York, was the single darkest item. By the time she died at forty-seven of liver cancer she looked seventy.

  Sheet music for “C’était un jour de fête,” by Édith Piaf and Marguerite Monnot, 1941

  Piaf as packaged for the American market, early 1950s

  Sheet music for “Y’a pas d’printemps,” by Édith Piaf, 1944

  Her music, meanwhile, grew past the confines of Belleville, of Paris, of France—when the American public, ordinarily not given to much patience with anything in a foreign language, accorded her its imprimatur after the war, it crowned her as a world star, among the very first not to have been processed through the Hollywood mill. But then, in her prime, her voice told you all you needed to know about the contents of a song. Her singing may have lacked some of the artistry of Damia or Billie Holiday, but her genius lay in her lack of boundaries: between herself and the song, and herself and the listener. As Léon-Paul Fargue wrote, “The subject of the song has to roll around in her voice like a body in a bed.” While her voice never lost its cutting réaliste vibrato, descended in a direct line from Eugénie Buffet, it was internationalized by her willfulness; in her later recordings she is clearly addressing her intimate concerns to a vast arena, a thousand times bigger than the Palace or the Olympia. The jazzy syncopation of her first worldwide hit, “La vie en rose” (1947), certainly didn’t hurt; nor the ultra-Parisian shtick of “Milord” (1959), which, through the brilliance of Marguerite Monnot, manages to telescope the rhythms and intonations of everything from Offenbach to the Moulin-Rouge to the tourist traps of Place du Tertre into its suave four minutes. By the time we get to “Non, je ne regrette rien” the following year, we are approaching the new world order of the franchised musical, of Man of La Mancha and Les misérables and the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was certainly not Piaf’s fault that when she died, Paris was on the verge of becoming the trade name “Paris.” If she was an accomplice, it was both because she contained her city within herself and because she couldn’t help projecting herself outward. In addition to being a nonpareil vocalist who encapsulated and apotheosized an entire tradition, she was the point of a prism.

  10

  Mort aux Vaches

  The Parisians have long had an equivocal attitude toward crime. Theft was often just a matter of making ends meet, after all, and brawls certainly happened and sometimes turned out badly. This is not to imply that most Parisians have been criminals, in any era. It’s just that even the law-abiding could often appreciate a well-played hand on the dark side, or at the very least could find solidarity in opposing and undermining the sergents de ville, who were mere instruments of the upper classes and whose job was to make everyone’s life miserable, not only those of thieves and killers. Celebrity criminals have been a feature of every society in the world—bandits among the peasantry, toughs in the cities—but perhaps the Parisian model had more style. In any account there is no getting around François Villon (1431–c. 1463), who was one of the very earliest modern poets and recognized for his gifts even in his time, but who was also a brawler and a thief. At the very least he is known to have killed a priest and participated in the burglary of five hundred gold écus from the sacristy of the Collège de Navarre, as well as being implicated in many smaller larcenies and any number of assaults in tavern set-tos. His rap sheet never impinged upon his literary esteem.

  Two and a half centuries later there was Cartouche (Louis Dominique Garthausen, 1693–1721), the “beloved bandit.” He was a cutpurse, burglar, and highwayman who from a very young age commanded a gang of men and women that seems never to have numbered fewer than a hundred and at its peak was perhaps two thousand strong. Legends abound of his gallantry, derring-do, and redistribution of wealth. One night, allegedly, he broke into the hôtel of a duchess and demanded not money but an intimate supper with champagne. The food was acceptable, but not the wine, he told her, and left; the following day a case of very good champagne arrived at her door. In 1719 he is said to have stopped a man from jumping into the Seine. It turned out his problem was overwhelming debt, and Cartouche instructed him to tell his creditors to come the following day to a tavern in the Cité. Cartouche was indeed there with a sack containing twenty-seven thousand livres, and paid off the creditors. Then his confederates jumped them on Rue de Glatigny and took the money back. More significantly and verifiably, Cartouche’s band made off with 1.3 million livres in shares from the coffers of the state-appointed swindler John Law, which certainly did not damage his popularity with the many citizens who had suffered directly or indirectly from Law’s schemes.

  François Villon

  But it had to end, especially since Cartouche had cohorts in high places who worried about being unmasked and implicated. He was arrested twice and escaped; a third time he was given away by a barking dog. He denied everything and refused to speak, even after having his legs crushed in the method of torture known as les brodequins. Finally, maybe because he was disappointed not to have been freed by his gang, he made a complete confession before the judges. More than 350 arrests followed, and the sum of the consequent trials took two years. His admissions did not save him, however. He was broken on the wheel and roasted alive before a large crowd on Place de Grève, after which thousands paid admission to see his remains, exhibited in a nearby shack for days. And that illustrates another aspect of the historical Parisian fascination with crime: the general interest in public executions, which began in the mists and lasted until the practice was abolished in 1939.

  A dime novel about Cartouche, 1907

  If crime is a constant in Parisian history, it also marks the boundary between the old world and the modern. Until the second or third decade of the nineteenth century, crime was exceptional, or at least something that happened to other people. If you regularly transported jewelry by coach between the city and Versailles, you might expect to be held up on occasion; and if you frequented certain dives in the Cité, you did not go there unarmed or alone. For the ordinary citizen, though, the night held no terrors. Chevalier points out that Mercier’s nocturnal wanderings in the eighteenth century were conspicuously lacking in danger; the same was true of Restif’s. “On the whole it was an unhealthy and brutal city, its faubourgs inhabited by a primitive population, but it wasn’t menaced by crime or haunted by fear; it was crowded with unfortunates, but not with criminals.” By 1830
, however, a pair of journalists could write:

  Those who have something to hide come to Paris. They see the labyrinth of its streets and the depravity of its morals, and they plunge into it as if into a forest. Paris must change. Its current makeup is a grave wrong. Statistics of crime demonstrate that it numbers twice as many thieves as any of the other royal courts in France. The almost 900,000 people crowded there are prey to twice as much corruption as the 31 million who surround it.

  Despite the authors’ seeming belief in an inherently criminal mind-set—they were hardly alone in this—the principal factor was overcrowding, the chief difference the contrast between the demographically stable population of the ancien régime and the enormous influx that occurred after the revolution and especially during the Restoration after the fall of Napoléon. Although many commentators were content to fulminate along general preacherly lines, the demographic equation did not escape attention, and crime was employed as an argument against unchecked immigration, then almost entirely from within the Hexagon but especially the south, whose natives were sometimes considered to be almost a different species. And, naturally, overcrowding bred joblessness, poverty, disease, and every other affliction that might drive people to crime. In 1845 George Sand wrote, “There are no poor people in the streets anymore. You have prohibited them from begging out of doors, and the man without means begs at night, knife in hand.”

  An ambush by an apache, 1890s

  Fear was in the air by then. That was in part a consequence of how the city was laid out, with the streets of the poor and the streets of the rich entangled together everywhere in the center. No journey from point A to point B failed to involve crossing class boundaries. Navigation involved among other things a sense of physical nuance as finely tuned as that of any experienced forester; every Parisian pedestrian was Natty Bumppo alert to the snapping twig and the interrupted birdsong. Balzac presents the landscape in The History of the Thirteen: