No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [100]
Piaf recorded this mesmerizing song, “La Foule,” along with “Les Prisons du roi,” in preparation for her return to the Olympia in the new year, following a brief tour of French leading cities. Meanwhile, she engaged a singer named Félix Marten as her vedette américaine, the last act on the first half of the program, even though she did not think much of his repertoire. In November, she told France Dimanche that Jacques Liébrard was the love of her life, but soon, on learning that he had slept with her secretary, banished the guitarist from the Boulevard Lannes and from her company. She was already looking to Marten as his replacement.
In December, Piaf joined the cast of Marcel Blistène’s new film, Les Amants de demain. Playing an unhappy woman who finds peace in prison with the man she loves after killing her brutish husband, she performed four songs, including the saccharine title number and the poignant lullaby “Les Neiges de Finlande,” whose lyrics affirmed her love of fairy tales. Piaf allowed that, though she liked making movies, she preferred the music-hall—because there, “you’re in charge of everything, you make all your own decisions.”
In the new year, she began making choices for her engagement at the Olympia. Repeating the same process as with Montand and other protégés, she worked closely with Marten, a tall, good-looking man with a cynical air, to bring out his tender side by teaching him love songs, a genre he had never attempted. Piaf’s wish to be in charge came out in force during rehearsals. Marten must move his arms naturally, she shouted; he must feel the ballad written for him by Rivgauche, a declaration of love that began: “Je veux te dire: je t’aime, je t’aime, mon amour.” Despite Marten’s reluctance, understandable given that he was married and the song was addressed to Edith, he rose to the occasion on opening night, February 6, 1958, and earned good reviews.
But it was not Marten that the star-studded crowd (including Juliette Gréco) came to see. When Piaf appeared onstage, Le Monde’s critic wrote, “an ear-splitting sound, a long salvo of applause, literally glued her to the microphone.… Whatever people say, whatever she does, Edith Piaf generates a flood of enthusiasm. Is it art, science, genius? Anything one could write about her is eclipsed by this perpetual miracle.” Her opening number, “Mon Manège à moi,” treating love as a merry-go-round, suited her, the critic added, but it was “La Foule” that revealed her genius.
Decades later, we can imagine this moment, the culmination of her mature style, with the aid of contemporary film clips and reviews. Standing under the spotlight with her eyes half closed, Piaf mimed the throng’s ebb and flow with her arms. Only her face, her heart-shaped neckline, and those fluttering, swaying hands were visible. Her eyes opened; she sang the packed phrases of the first stanza in a trance but with impeccable diction and phrasing. Onstage yet out in the street, she seemed to lose her bearings until the last line of the opening bars, when the crowd thrusts her into the arms of a stranger.
With each line we hear the throng’s cries in her husky tones; with each throb of her vibrato we feel the couple borne along by forces greater than themselves. Like the newfound lovers, the spectators become “one body” (“un seul corps”). All of us—singer, musicians, audience—are caught in the rapturous waltz (“folle farandole”) filling the hall as she sings of her bliss: “Nos deux corps enlacés s’envolent / Et retombent tous deux, / Epanouis, enivrés, et heureux.” (“Our bodies entwined soar / And together alight, / Intoxicated, radiant, happy.”) Living fully within the music, she reveals her listeners to themselves.
Like many of Piaf’s songs, “La Foule” stages love’s appearances and disappearances, but it does so more theatrically