No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [11]
At Le Havre, when Edith was scheduled to sing at a movie theater before the film, she awoke with a fever and a raspy cough. She stayed in bed all day but insisted on going on that night. Although her father was opposed to her endangering her health, she prevailed. “For people in our situation, it was worth making an effort for the take, however small. I sang, and afterward Papa gave me two big kisses on the cheek. I was startled and happy. He had never been so proud of his daughter.”
On another occasion, a middle-class couple who were smitten with the child proposed to take her off Louis’s hands. They offered him a hundred thousand francs—a very large sum—for the right to adopt her. “I’m not in the business of selling kids,” she heard him say: “Why not make one of your own?” It is telling that Piaf situated this incident—to her mind, the proof that “he would never consent to being separated from me”—at Sens, the town that was the site of her parents’ marriage.
During the time when Line remained in Turkey, Louis did not lack for companionship. “A handsome man, fickle, and an incorrigible womanizer, he was never alone for long,” his daughter recalled. When people asked whether she had a mother, he always replied, “More than she needs!” Some of these temporary “mothers” were kind, she said, some less so, but none of them made her suffer: “Papa wouldn’t have tolerated it.” But, she allowed that some had been unkind. Of a certain Lucienne, Piaf said, “I still remember her thrashings, but that’s because it was during her reign that I saw Papa cry for the first time”—an interpretation that lets Louis off the hook as being Edith’s covictim. Perhaps the child found comfort in Saint Thérèse’s promise that prayer could soften the hardest of hearts.
When Edith was ten, Louis formed a liaison with a woman named Sylviane who lived in Lyon. Their son died soon after his birth; Louis took Edith on tour, leaving Sylviane to mourn alone. Shortly after their return, Edith ran away. On the train, she told her fellow passengers that her parents beat her, and that she was escaping to her grandmother’s in Normandy. A kindly woman pretended to be her guardian when the conductor came; Edith managed to get all the way to Bernay. “I had worked it all out,” she told a journalist, whose reactions to this tale are missing, as are her reception at Maman Tine’s and her father’s mood when he came to retrieve her. Though the tale of her escape recalls the perils of Victor Hugo’s Cosette, it is clear that the ten-year-old knew a great deal about travel, and even more about telling a story.
In Piaf’s recollections of these years, Louis’s liaisons seem like stops on an amorous tour de France. He had the seductive charm of those who get on by ingratiating themselves with others. Shrewd when it came to recruiting women, he placed advertisements in the regional newspapers: “Young woman wanted to look after child. Job includes enjoyable travel.” Job candidates must have been struck by this diminutive father-daughter couple and may have wondered to what extent another person would be welcome.
A second Sylviane signed on in Nancy, when Louis and Edith were touring Alsace-Lorraine. This romance lasted long enough for Louis to bring his new partner to Falaise to meet his family. In the photograph taken that day, Edith looks about ten. She stands between Louis and Sylviane—who is identified on the back of the photo as “the girlfriend of the moment.” Edith’s expression implies a precocious sense that while domestic partners come and go, the love of father and child remains the lodestar of relationships.
By then she also knew what it took to survive. From her father she learned an entertainer’s sense of timing,