No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [21]
The chronology of these events is unclear, but the void caused by the loss of Cécelle was partly filled by the man who became Edith’s protector. (Piaf called this milieu big shot Albert in her memoirs; the locals used his gang name, Ali-Baba; Berteaut identified him as Henri Valette.) Their liaison, which may have predated Cécelle’s departure from her life, perhaps explains why Edith did not go back to Belleville for her. And at eighteen she could not have understood that she was being drawn into a closed world, with its own codes and expectations.
Edith’s life at the Régence blended imperceptibly into a situation from which it would have been almost impossible to escape. The hotel adjoined a tavern called Au Clair de la Lune, whose regulars—men like Valette, addicts, and homosexuals—made her their mascot. After Momone left (the details of their separation are not known), Edith spent her spare time at the tavern, where an orchestra played until 3 a.m. and Valette, flanked by his crony “Tarzan,” presided over deals—mostly based on the earnings of their women. They dismissed la nouvelle as too scrawny; Valette changed his mind once she fell for his dodgy charm. When he said that she would have to work for him, Edith replied that working the streets her own way, she would earn the sums he required.
Her protector gave her a grudging respect and made her his accomplice. “I had to look out for dance halls where there were well-dressed women wearing necklaces and rings,” Piaf recalled. Valette then showed up at these places in his best suit. “Since he was very good-looking and full of confidence,” she continued, “he always succeeded in seducing his partner.” These evenings ended in the alley, where he snatched the woman’s jewels while Edith waited at a café. Later, she saw that her role gave him a hold over her: “It was the rule in the milieu. Men and women had to be compromised to keep them from escaping from the clutches of the crooks.” Piaf’s account is supported by the recollections of those who watched her struggle with the milieu’s mores.
At some point, when still besotted with Valette, she started singing at the Petit Jardin dance hall after the manager, who had heard her in the street, asked her to perform. On her first evening, the bandleader, the Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, said that although his new pianist didn’t know French, he, a “Kraut” named Glanzberg, would do his best to keep up with her. Her powerful voice made an impression, Glanzberg recalled, but he dismissed her as no more than an untrained street singer.
The Petit Jardin was a promotion from Lulu’s. The dance hall served as the milieu’s headquarters and a meeting place for young thieves hoping to impress the bosses who planned deals there while awaiting the return of their protégées—but also for bourgeois who liked to go slumming. Accompanied by her friend Jo Privat, Edith sang lyrics that could have been written for the Petit Jardin’s audience—like “Le Barbeau de Saint-Jean,” a woman’s lament for her lover: “Il ne m’aime plus, ni moi non plus / C’est du passé, n’en parlons plus.” (“He doesn’t love me anymore, I don’t love him either / It’s a thing of the past, let’s not talk about it anymore.”) The patrons “had a soft spot for her,” the writer Auguste le Breton, observed: “She knew how to project the songs that got under their skin, the songs inspired by these violent streets.… She gave off the odor of the street, of poverty, hunger, suicide.” Hookers wiped their eyes when she sang; pimps greeted her when she came offstage.
One night le Breton, then an eighteen-year-old, went to the Petit Jardin bar—where Edith was drinking wine. “Her shoes were down at the heel, but her shapely legs were sheathed in silk stockings, a jarring note given the rest of her.” A hoodlum was amusing himself by getting her drunk. When the youth allowed that he would do better to buy her a meal, they began to fight. Le Breton pulled out a knife, his adversary brandished a gun, a milieu chief told the youth to take the singer elsewhere.