No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [18]
“Edith wouldn’t have left the baby behind for anything in the world,” Berteaut explained. Still smarting from Line’s having abandoned her in infancy, she continued to nurse Cécelle, trundling her all over Paris on the Métro. A young Belleville resident who saved coins to toss to her on Sundays recalled the ample bosom and powerful lungs of the little street singer: “She had a voice fit for a cathedral; it seemed to come from far away.… She just stood there, her feet planted on the pavement, and sang anything, from popular songs like Tino Rossi’s ‘Catarinetta’ to masterpieces like ‘Les Deux Ménétriers.’ … The girl who came with her picked up the coins but ‘my singer’ never looked up. She just sang, as if inhabited by the music.”
By the winter of 1933–34, Piaf was performing as “Miss Edith” in a trio with Camille Ribon and his wife. They toured the army barracks from Clignancourt in the north to Vincennes in the east, L’Ecole Militaire, and, this time under better auspices, Versailles. Despite Edith’s earnings, P’tit Louis was not pleased. Perhaps his pride was hurt. “I felt that something was missing,” Piaf said, “the protective strength of a man, a real man.” Her companion was more like another child.
Edith’s weakness for men in uniform made it almost inevitable that she would find someone with the strength she desired. Before a performance at the Colonial Infantry barracks (the branch that her brother, Herbert, joined), a handsome blond soldier asked if he might pay for his seat with a kiss. Edith agreed. “As for the kiss,” she told him, “we’ll see about that later, provided you behave yourself,” Piaf recalled in the first account of their affair. That night, she fell in love and considered leaving Louis for this man, even though he often landed in the brig. Her soldier went AWOL the next day to see her; they discussed the hopelessness of their situation, and, after a night together, parted. “I was shattered,” Piaf said, “mourning for the happiness I’d lost just when I’d found it.” Their story was like a cheap romance novel, she said years later.
P’tit Louis may not have known about this man, but he soon realized that Edith no longer loved him. He pleaded with her to stay with him for Cécelle’s sake. Edith’s father and stepmother were called in. They tried to reason with her, but she had already decided to leave. “And when Edith decided on something,” Denise wrote, “there was no point in trying to make her change her mind.”
Soon she began exploring Montmartre, the raffish neighborhood where some of the performers she knew sang in clubs. With Momone, who came back at the first opportunity, she went to sing out of doors at the Place du Tertre and at the Lapin Agile, the cabaret where the chanson-réaliste tradition began. The chanteuse Rina Ketty, who befriended her there, was struck by the newcomer: “She interpreted those songs with such intensity that it hit you right in the gut. When she sang she was a great lady. Afterward it wasn’t the same. She was surrounded by men, all drinking, smoking, having a good time.”
One day, on the way down the hill from Montmartre to Pigalle, Edith and Momone met the owner of a nightclub, a woman named Lulu, who dressed like a man. After an audition, Lulu booked them to appear at the club, because, she explained, her customers liked girls who looked as if they had just stepped off the street.
This engagement gave Edith the idea that she might have a profession. By the 1930s, Fréhel, Damia, and Edith’s new model, Marie