No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [17]
To avoid arrest—street singing wasn’t legal—the girls performed as far away as they could from police stations. When a large crowd gathered around them one day, the local policeman told Edith to move across the road. Then he asked her to sing his favorite—a fantasy of fleeting love called “Le Chaland qui passe” (“The Passing Barge”). Edith’s rendition pleased him. Exclaiming that no one sang of love’s transports the way she did, he gave her five francs.
On occasions when the girls were hauled off to the station, the police let them go after hearing Edith’s heart-wrenching tales about their impoverished parents and their need to earn money. She was looking after her kid sister, she explained: with no training, all she could do was sing. (Being presented to the authorities as Edith’s sibling no doubt planted the seed that resulted, decades later, in Berteaut’s memoir.)
Edith also organized performances at the army barracks around Paris. Their mess halls were warm in winter; the soldiers warmed to the girls’ nubile charms. Momone did gymnastics, Edith sang her more risqué songs, they met the men afterward in the local cafés. Though these flirtations made the girls feel “alive,” they didn’t count, Berteaut wrote: “You don’t owe them anything.… You can joke and fool around as much as you please.”
Edith continued to fool around until she fell in love with a young man named Louis Dupont, known as P’tit Louis. They met in a café in Romainville, a suburb northeast of Paris, where she was performing. Of this meeting she recalled: “He looked me straight in the eye, whistled with admiration, and with a regal flourish put a five-sou coin into my cup.” For the next few days the pleasant-looking youth turned up wherever she was, then proposed that they live together. Louis joined Edith and Momone at the Hôtel de l’Avenir until the couple found an inexpensive furnished room.
With no kitchen facilities available, they ate from the tin cans that Edith heated on a hot plate. On Sundays they sat on the cheap wooden seats at the local cinema to watch Charlie Chaplin. Louis picked up the necessities for housekeeping on his jobs as a delivery boy, “cutlery or plates or saucepans that he’d stolen from shop displays or at cafés,” Piaf recalled, as if this were the normal way to start life together.
Edith was sixteen and a half and Louis eighteen when she realized that she was pregnant. She and Momone continued their rounds, often running into Louis on his delivery route. In his view, she should not have been on the streets; sedentary work was more appropriate to someone in her condition, and it would allow them to get rid of Momone. Edith took a job at a boot factory, but when her pregnancy became obvious, the foreman said that he had to let her go. Years later, Piaf told interviewers that she stayed on awhile longer after softening up the foreman with a song. Her brief stint in the factory had shown that she was not meant to be a member of the working class.
Edith gave birth to a girl on February 11, 1933, at the Tenon Hospital, where she had been born seventeen years earlier. They named the baby Marcelle. P’tit Louis recognized his daughter (he and Edith were not married) and announced her arrival to his “in-laws,” who came to the hospital with presents. When the Gassions learned that no one had thought to acquire a layette, they gave Edith her half sister’s baby clothes. After Louis and Edith went to live with his mother in Romainville, Yeyette visited to show her how to care for the infant—soon known as Cécelle. (In Berteaut’s version of the story, the young couple and Cécelle lived with her.)
It surprised Edith’s family that she adored her daughter.