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’s example, Edith learned soulful tunes to balance the dark “realism” of her borrowed repertoire. She kept on belting out Damia’s parigot songs, like “J’ai l’cafard” (“I’m bored”), which recalls “La Coco” in its allusion to “Drogues infâmes / Qui charment les femmes” (“vile drugs that harm / and women charm”). But she also sang one of Damia’s greatest successes, “Les Deux Ménétriers” (“The Two Fiddlers”). This “macabre gallop” urges the dead to come back to life by loving unstintingly: “Il vous faut aimer encore! / Aimez donc! Enlacez vous!” (“You have to love again! / Start loving! Wrap yourselves around each other!”) Edith’s rendition of this stirring call to love echoed in the streets like an anthem for the poor, who had little but mutual affection to rely on.

Some time after the birth of Denise, Louis acquiesced to Edith’s wish for independence on the condition that she remain in Belleville in a rented room, paid for with her earnings. Her father kept an eye on her through acquaintances like Camille Ribon, an acrobat whose specialty was standing on his thumbs. Ribon, who taught acrobatics to the neighborhood children, looked after Edith, though she showed no aptitude for his art. (He would be one of the old friends whom she helped to support once she became famous.)

Edith visited Ribon one day when a younger girl was going through her paces. Although a talented gymnast, the girl was plain, with narrow, darting eyes. They began talking. At fourteen, Simone Berteaut, known as Momone, worked in a factory assembling car headlights. Momone was impressed by Edith’s tales of life on the street, and even more by her earnings. She sang only when she felt like it, Edith explained; she was her own boss. Momone should work for her, she said unexpectedly. She could take the collection, as Edith had done with Louis, since Edith earned enough for both of them.

“I was bowled over.… I’d have followed her to the ends of the earth,” Berteaut would write in her spirited but misleading life of the singer, in which she presents herself as Edith’s half sister. Later in life, Piaf called Berteaut her mauvaise génie (the evil spirit who brought out the worst in her) and omitted her from her memoirs. But at sixteen she was happy to find a friend who would do her bidding. When there were two of you, she told the younger girl, audiences took you seriously; if the sidekick had music to distribute, they didn’t see you as beggars.

Madame Berteaut offered no resistance to the plan except to demand compensation for her daughter’s wages. According to Berteaut, whose book is most reliable on their early years, Edith agreed to pay her room, board, and fifteen francs a day, to be turned over to her mother. An understanding was reached, and the young girl left home to become Edith’s foil. No one seems to have reflected that their status as self-sufficient young women resembled that of the other sort of streetwalkers, the filles who figured prominently in the popular imagination and in Edith’s repertoire.

The girls shared a room at the Hôtel de l’Avenir—a name that seemed like a good omen. She would become someone in the future, Edith told Momone, often stopping in churches to light candles and pray for guidance. But Momone, whose upbringing was that of a guttersnipe, was puzzled by Edith’s faith in God and her devotion to Saint Thérèse. The younger girl’s fixation on her “big sister,” composed of gratitude, jealousy, and resentment, would warp her perceptions of their life together and her own role in Piaf’s path to success.

Enchanted with their freedom, the friends rose late and took their time before going out. Edith had to drink coffee and gargle before performing, but once she was ready, she had “that same voice … the voice worth millions later on.” She sang to be heard at a distance, her voice coming from her chest as well as through what musicians call the “mask”—the resonators in the head—which enhanced her titi accent and gave her the nasal tone common to singers needing to project over street noise.

Edith planned their itineraries according