No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [14]
His remarks are charitable, given that some time after the Gassions’ reunion, Line again abandoned her son. The boy lived with family friends, then at the mercy of the welfare system, an experience that prompted him to enlist in the colonial army as soon as he came of age. Herbert would say nothing about his mother’s many “mistakes” except that in later years, she was badly “adrift.”
In addition to learning that Line was a drifter, Edith may have formed the opinion that mothers often abandon their children. About this time, Louis filed for divorce, giving as his residence Maman Tine’s establishment in Bernay. The decree became final on June 4, 1929, when he was nearing fifty and Edith was thirteen. Still touring with her father on occasion (by this time, Louis may have found it hard to twist himself into knots), she met the last in the series of stepmothers who were more or less kind.
In 1930, on what may have been a farewell tour, Louis placed an ad in the Nancy newspaper and found a new partner, Jeanne L’Hôte, called Yeyette, who was only twenty, five years older than Edith. The new stepmother and stepdaughter moved to Belleville with Louis, higher up the hill, at 115 rue de Belleville, but not far from where Edith had lived as an infant. (If they learned of Aîcha’s death on July 18, 1930, no mention was later made of it.)
Yeyette gave birth to Edith’s half sister, Denise, on February 8, 1931, but refused Louis’s offer of marriage, a puzzling decision given the stigma attached to status as a fille-mère (unwed mother). Edith ran away several times, only to be brought back by her father, who was her legal guardian. Yeyette was too busy with Denise to discipline her unruly stepdaughter, and Edith too attached to Louis to share his affections with his new family. She spent most of her time away from home.
Despite the locals’ treatment of pretty girls who were not en ménage (shacked up) as fair game, the men of Belleville did not pose a threat. An unattached female was often the butt of innuendos designed as much to impress other men as to attract her attention, but Edith knew how to give as good as she got. Moreover, she did so in the piquant local slang and with a titi-parisien accent (a corruption of “good French” that marked one as working-class). This precocious knowledge stood her in good stead while she established herself as one of the “regulars” who sang in the streets and on weekends, at the bals-musettes that perpetuated the old traditions even as the village landscape was changing.
From the Gassions’ apartment halfway up the hill it took barely fifteen minutes to amble down to Belleville’s social center, the square at the bottom of the street. Popular tunes wafting from the cafés mingled with the outdoor musicians’ waltzes and rumbas. Whenever the young accordionist Jo Privat, a local favorite, accompanied Edith, ragpickers hushed their cries to listen, and housewives dropped coins from their windows.
In the 1920s, the French working class rarely had access to records; songs were popularized mainly through the street singers’ repertoires. It helped to come equipped for performances with petit-format sheet music to sell, the small-size scores printed by music publishers for this purpose. One day at a publisher’s office Edith met a young music fan, Pierre Hiégel, who would become one of her impresarios. “I bought her coffee and a croissant, which was all I could afford,” Hiégel recalled. “We stayed in touch for the rest of her life.” He was awed by her ability to memorize a song after hearing it a few times, and even more by her intelligence: “Right after a real heartbreaker she would sing a few more subtle songs, the better to sock you in the guts with the next number!”
Edith soon became known in Belleville for her astounding voice, her saucy charm, and her give-and-take, the chaffing repartee that Parisians call la gouaille. She was often seen in the cafés—at the Vielleuse, where a statue of a woman playing the hurdy-gurdy on the roof