No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [19]
P’tit Louis quarreled with Edith about her new job. In his opinion, Lulu’s was a joint frequented by hookers and lesbians. He issued an ultimatum: she must refuse the offer, or their life together was finished. The choice was not difficult. Edith packed her belongings and with Cécelle, who was already a toddler, joined Momone in Pigalle.
CHAPTER THREE
1933–1935
By the time Edith moved to Pigalle, the artists who had lived there and in Montmartre before the war—Picasso and company—had mostly decamped to Montparnasse and other more respectable parts of Paris. Though Montmartre’s bohemian past still drew tourists, especially foreign ones, visitors in search of local color were more likely to go slumming in the nightclubs that dotted the streets of lower Montmartre, as Pigalle was called—where small-time crooks, members of le milieu (the French mafia), and upstanding citizens intermingled. In the 1930s, when Edith was absorbing the area’s louche atmosphere, Pigalle had already acquired mythic status as “the most intense chapter in the history of Paris’s lower depths—but lower depths, unlike those of Belleville, that are inseparable from their suggestive setting.”
P’tit Louis had been right about the high concentration of hookers in the area. Pigalle’s many small hotels offered rooms by the hour as well as for the night. Edith moved, with and without Momone, from one alluringly named hotel to another. After some time at the Hôtel Eden, which had the advantage of a cheap restaurant next door, she settled at the Régence. It became her headquarters, the site of her education in local mores, and the place where she left Cécelle when performing at Lulu’s. She soon learned that it was also a meeting place for le milieu.
As its proprietor’s mannish dress implied, Lulu’s welcomed women who liked women, along with a mixed clientele of prostitutes, crooks, and partygoers. Momone’s juvenile form (“I didn’t have any bosom or any behind,” she wrote) appealed to Lulu’s customers; they liked the slim, undernourished bodies of waifs like her and Edith. To enhance their ambiguous appeal, Lulu dressed them both in sailor costumes, though Momone often shed hers to perform gymnastics in the nude.
The two friends got on well with the hookers who waited there for clients, and with a sympathetic garçon who fed them the remains from customers’ meals. But Lulu rarely kept their agreement about wages. If the girls were even five minutes late, she deducted ten francs from their salary. (“It’s not easy to arrive bang on time without a watch,” Berteaut wrote, “especially when you don’t have any notion of time.”) To make extra money, they “collected corks,” which meant chatting with customers while they downed champagne, then presenting the corks at closing time—to be paid so much per bottle. Their nights often lasted until dawn. When Edith had the energy, she stumbled into the street to sing before going to bed. There she felt more like herself.
Piaf’s memoirs are reticent about this period. Au bal de la chance (The Wheel of Fortune) omits the Pigalle years; Ma vie (My Life) reduces her time among the local pimps and prostitutes to a series of affairs, including one with the man who became her protector—though he offered a different type of protection from the sort she had imagined. But if Piaf preferred to forget the dark poetry of Pigalle, its smoky atmosphere colored her songs, the sulfurous repertoire for which she became known.
To pass the time at Lulu’s, the pianist encouraged her to sing “C’était un musicien,” a tango tune that could have been their theme song: “C’était un musicien qui jouait dans une boîte de nuit / Jusqu’aux lueurs de l’aube il berçait les amours d’autrui.” (“He was a musician who played in the nightclub