No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [23]
Edith’s friends wondered how she kept going in the face of such trials—her complicated affairs, her distressing rapport with Line, the loss of Cécelle to P’tit Louis. “She took strength from her love of singing,” one of them wrote. “She never dared to hope for success, just to be able to live and to keep singing.” Edith sometimes mentioned her “secret,” the inner strength that helped her to cope with what fate had dealt her. Her admirers took this secret to be her reliance on her talent: like most people over the course of her life, they knew nothing of her other secret, her spiritual belief.
Piaf’s devotion was a private matter. Few saw beyond the medal of Thérèse de Lisieux that she wore around her neck—a common practice in Catholic France. Fewer still knew that between street performances she often slipped into nearby churches to pray. Her faith in Saint Thérèse never wavered. According to Danielle Bonel, Piaf’s confidante in later years, “she prayed to her to find peace, beauty, lightness of spirit, joie de vivre.… To feel safe, she needed the protection of a supernatural power.” But she rarely went to mass, preferring her private devotion to institutionalized ritual.
Edith’s faith was tested when Cécelle became ill in the summer of 1935. P’tit Louis came to her cabaret to tell her that the two-year-old had meningitis, then considered incurable. She had been rushed to the Children’s Hospital, on the Left Bank, for a lumbar puncture—a treatment that required a waiting period to see if the patient would survive. Thinking back to this time, Piaf said, “For eight days I believed in miracles.” On July 6, she walked all the way from Pigalle to the hospital in time to see Cécelle open her eyes. She spent the night praying to Saint Thérèse, but learned the next morning that her daughter had died.
Accounts differ about what took place that day. Piaf remembered being alone with her sorrow; Berteaut claimed to have accompanied her to the hospital and back to Pigalle, where she put Edith to sleep by drugging her with Pernod. (Momone probably came back into Edith’s life after she left Valette.) Their immediate task was to find money to bury Cécelle. After Edith’s friends took up a collection, ten francs were still lacking. In Piaf’s version, that night she was accosted by a man who asked what it cost to go to bed with her. Without thinking, she replied, “Ten francs.” He took her to a hotel room, where she burst into tears and told him why she had accepted his offer. “I saw that he felt sorry for me, that he would let me go without demanding what he’d paid for. It’s in memory of that unknown man that I’ve helped others whenever I could, without asking anything from them.”
In Berteaut’s account, the man got what he paid for but gave Edith more than the paltry sum she requested. Piaf corroborated this version in an interview with Jean Noli, the journalist who helped her write Ma vie toward the end of her life. The truth would shock readers, he thought. Why not say that the man had felt sorry for her? “You’re right,” Piaf is said to have replied. “It’s better that way, more moral.” Piaf also told Noli that she had Cécelle’s coffin blessed at Saint-Pierre de Montmartre, the small church in the shadow of Sacré-Coeur, and, with P’tit Louis, buried their daughter in a pauper’s grave at the Thiais Cemetery.
“It was a very dark moment in our lives,” Berteaut wrote, “one of the rottenest times we ever went through, … but to tell the truth, it didn’t last long.” In Berteaut’s recollection of that summer, when Edith was nineteen and she was seventeen, they just stopped thinking about Cécelle: “We were only kids, and we didn’t give it another thought.”
Momone may have forgotten the little girl, but Edith never stopped thinking about her—though she rarely mentioned her