No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [12]
What was more, the Gassions’ bohemian way of life had trained Edith to meet each situation as it arose, and to respect, or at least accept, all sorts of people. The years on the road with Louis offered a telling contrast to the mock respectability Edith had known in Bernay. Their hand-to-mouth life was the opposite of, though also the complement to, the bourgeois existence Piaf would never fully adopt, even long after her success. At heart she would always be a traveler—turning each of her many dwellings into a Gypsy caravan.
CHAPTER TWO
1926–1932
What did she recall of her years with her father? Piaf asked herself near the end of her life. “A new mother every three months: his mistresses, who were more or less kind to me, depending on whether my songs—I was already singing, and doing the collection—brought me money or catcalls.”
Things might have turned out differently with more reliable mothering, she thought. “I had gone through a peculiar apprenticeship in life and love, which hardly disposed me toward romanticism. My mother had not been by my side to teach me that love could be tender, faithful, and sweet, so very sweet.” Dictating these thoughts to a journalist friend, the aging Piaf did not reflect that it may have been this changing cast of maternal substitutes that made her cling to the idea of unconditional love—the tender, faithful, sweet affection that she sought for the rest of her life in her chosen companions.
Memory is selective, especially when one is retelling one’s life to bring out its better moments. Piaf said nothing about the reasons for her return to Paris with her father, which occurred at some point in her early adolescence. The one anecdote that she did recall from this time is indicative. It associates her mother’s reappearance in their life with a fleeting family reunion and a maternal kiss.
One evening, Louis took Edith, then about eleven, to a bistro in the raffish Faubourg Saint-Martin neighborhood, where entertainers gathered before their gigs at local cafés and cabarets. They were standing together at the bar when a woman with dark hair, thick bangs, and large earrings asked to embrace Edith. “My father doesn’t allow me to kiss people I don’t know,” she replied. Smiling, Louis told her to go ahead: “You have my permission; that’s your maman, the real one.”
Although Piaf’s recollection of this meeting is tantalizingly brief, her brother, Herbert, provided a few more details years later. Having recently returned from four years in Turkey, their mother had taken Herbert to live with her in Paris. An agent was handling Line’s career; she turned up that night because she was singing in a club across the street. “While our parents talked, Edith and I played outside on the sidewalk. Then Mother took me away and my sister went with Father. That’s all.” Line had not, as Piaf told an interviewer, invited them to a restaurant, nor had she tried to reclaim Edith—instances of wishful thinking, Herbert implied, on his sister’s part.
The details of Line’s career are equally tantalizing. She returned to Paris in the mid-1920s, about the time when Edith and Louis settled there. According to Herbert, she found occasional gigs at cabarets like the Chat Noir or the Mikado in Pigalle, and the Monocle, a lesbian club, in Montparnasse, but more often performed in the beuglants (working-class dives), where her daughter would also belt out the melancholy ballads known as chansons réalistes.
The tradition of “realistic song”—a nostalgic, often sentimental, evocation of Parisian working-class life—dates back to before the Great War, when performers like Aristide Bruant and Eugénie Buffet entertained audiences