No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [124]
After Théo and Loulou Barrier left for Paris at the end of the weekend, more impromptu visitors arrived—Simone Berteaut and her daughter Edith. When Momone had telephoned earlier that day to ask if she might come to Plascassier, Piaf told Danielle to say that she was too tired. Her old friend came anyway, hoping for a reconciliation that did not take place. Edith was too weak to see her and her namesake for more than a few minutes. (In her 1969 life of the star, Berteaut would invent a touching reunion scene to exonerate her misdeeds.)
On October 9 (the anniversary of her wedding to Théo), chills and dizzy spells kept Edith in bed. Sure that she would never sing again, she listened to all of her recordings. Cocteau phoned to say that he would come to see her very soon. Later, as her voice began to fail, she told Danielle, “My dear, we’ll go on more splendid trips together.”
In Simone Margantin’s account, Edith asked the nurse to lie next to her on the bed while she napped. After she went down to eat dinner, she heard Edith calling her and rushed upstairs. Barely able to speak, Edith said she was afraid. With Simone’s help, she knelt on the floor to whisper her prayers. During the night, when the nurse went to Edith’s room to check on her, she was shocked to find her face the color of straw. She called the local doctor, who came early the next morning and said that it was a matter of time. Unaware that Edith was hemorrhaging internally, Simone tried to make her comfortable, wiping her forehead and lips, holding her hand. Danielle took turns at Edith’s bedside and called in vain for a priest to administer the last rites. That afternoon, Edith sat up, her brilliant blue eyes fixed on something in the distance. Then she fell back down, death having claimed her.
Just as the legends surrounding Piaf’s birth make it difficult to establish the truth, rival accounts of her death by those close to her give the biographer pause. One can see that life at close quarters with a luminary whose last days were under relentless surveillance by the press would set the household on edge, and that differences in background and temperament would be exacerbated under pressure. Decades later, Danielle Bonel contradicted Simone Margantin’s account of Piaf’s final hours: it was she, Danielle, the devoted long-term companion rather than the recent arrival, who had been with the star at the end.
With hindsight, we can see disagreements over Piaf’s death as competing stories about the passing of her spirit—the transmission to her intimates of her blessings. On October 10, the day she died, the two clans worked together to honor her wish to be buried beside her father and her daughter at Père-Lachaise. Danielle rushed to the clinic where Edith had last been treated and, with the mother superior’s help, found an ambulance to take her body to Paris—a move that was, strictly speaking, illegal, but one that allowed them to elude the reporters gathered outside the villa. Théo and Loulou arrived that afternoon from Paris. The ambulance left a few hours later, with Simone and Théo on either side of Edith, as if she were asleep. Danielle and Loulou closed up the house and flew to Orly the next day as headlines in extra-bold type announced Piaf’s death at seven that morning, her doctor having agreed to sign a certificate giving the date of her demise as October 11, and the place as Boulevard Lannes.
Alerted to the news, Cocteau delivered an impromptu eulogy on the state radio. “Edith Piaf burned herself up in the flames of her glory,” he began. “I never knew anyone who was less protective of her spirit. She didn’t dole it out, she gave everything away.… Like all those who live on courage, she didn’t think about death; she defied it. Only her voice remains, that splendid voice like black velvet that enhanced whatever she sang. But if I still have her voice, I have, alas, lost a great friend.” An hour later, the poet died—giving rise to the myth that France had lost two of its brightest stars