No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [110]
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 dance 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