No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [36]
If one stops to measure the distance Edith had come since her discovery by Leplée, one realizes that it had been harder, not to say more unlikely, to make the transition from joints like O’Dett’s to the music-halls than to move from street singing to the cabarets. By working nearly nonstop for the past three years, she had won over the critics and the general public. In a sense, she came on the scene as the last chanteuse réaliste, when a predominantly female radio audience still preferred her fatalistic songs to upbeat musical trends influenced by American-style swing and jazz.
Yet one can also see Piaf’s popularity in relation to a persistent myth celebrating the fringes of society—the crooks, pimps, whores, and other fallen women who were the dramatis personae of her music. Harking back to a familiar view of the past, her songs updated the tradition of urban poetry, a kind of popular epic in which misfortune must be endured—at least by its female characters, since its male ones, the soldiers, sailors, and other adventurers, all disappear, leaving their women to lament or, on occasion, shake their fists at Fate. Piaf’s way of seeming to rise above her hard-knock life may have been the reason that she was asked to sing at an anti-Franco rally that year, at the left-wing Palais de la Mutualité, on the Left Bank. Told to avoid songs that glorifed militarism, she belted out patriotic airs until the audience, composed mainly of pacifists, called out for everyone’s favorites, “Le Fanion de la légion” and “Mon Légionnaire.”
If Asso’s tragic legionnaire resonated in the popular imagination, the woman of easy virtue who gave herself to him was an equally evocative, and nostalgic, trope. Again inspired by Edith’s past, Asso gave this figure his full attention in his next song for her, “Elle fréquentait la rue Pigalle”—which harked back to the réaliste obsession with prostitutes: “Ell’ fréquentait la rue Pigalle, / Ell’ sentait l’vice à bon marché, / Elle était tout’ noire de péchés / Avec un pauvr’ visage tout pâle. / Pourtant y’avait dans l’fond d’ses yeux, / Comm’ quelqu’ chos’ de miraculeux / Qui semblait mettre un peu d’ciel bleu / Dans celui tout sale, de Pigalle.” (“She hung out on the rue Pigalle, / She smelled of cheap vice, / She was black with sin / With a poor pale face. / Yet there was something in her eyes / Like a miracle / That seemed to put a little blue / In the sooty sky of Pigalle.”)
Asso’s tale of a whore with a heart of gold ends badly when the man who tries to free her from the trade abandons her. The woman re-affirms the status quo by returning to Pigalle—though the little singer who seemed to be the incarnation of this character was already attempting to flee from its streets. A historian notes, “Critics who acclaimed Piaf’s renewal of the repertory of French Song were hearing a new voice rather than new themes, a re-identification of the singer and the words.” In time, she would escape from Asso’s limited vision of her potential. But for the next eighteen months, Edith accepted her Cyrano’s benevolent tyranny.
After her triumphant Bastille Day show in the provincial town of Tulle (in Corrèze, central France), the couple took a brief vacation at the Château de Lafont in Chenevelles. This estate belonged to the family of Edith’s new pianist, Max d’Yresnes, whose mother received paying guests. Engagements in Geneva, Deauville, Ostende, and Brussels took up the rest of the summer until it became obvious that, having worked continuously