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time for friendship, she found relief from Asso’s watchfulness with his collaborator, Marguerite Monnot. Piaf later called the woman she nicknamed Guite “my best friend and, of all the women in the world, the one I admire the most.” In her view the musician was “the living incarnation of the art.” It was all the more remarkable that, having been a child prodigy who gave piano concerts throughout Europe, Monnot had abandoned her classical career to write songs like “L’Etranger,” which had brought them together. Guite’s tales of her upbringing—her parents both taught music; friends came to their house each night to play and sing—would have enchanted Edith, who admired those who grew up with a knowledge of the arts. But their friendship was complicated by Guite’s artistic partnership with Asso in these years, when they were creating the repertoire that built Piaf’s reputation.

After her successful engagements at the Européen and the Bobino that autumn, Edith recovered sufficiently from her self-doubt to ask Asso about the terms of her contracts—a matter she had, until then, left to him. He took her questions as a sign of her desire for greater freedom. Manipulating her feelings of gratitude, he pleaded for one more year of obedience—after which she could go her own way. “I think you would be wrong to want to free yourself completely,” he told her, “but I will accept what you decide.”

During this time Edith turned to Jacques Bourgeat for advice. She found respite with him outside Paris, in the Vallée de Chevreuse, where the two friends often spent weekends walking, reading, and sitting in companionable silence. “Far from the noise, far from the world,” Bourgeat wrote, “with only a pile of books for company … an old man and a young girl recall memories and measure the paths they have trod. It’s a time devoted to study. From the writings of Sainte-Beuve they learn about those great figures of French literature who came to the region, whose spirits linger there”—Ronsard, Molière, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine. “Even Plato has followed the hermits there, with his Apology and Banquet under his arm,” Bourgeat continued. “What a noble company! And how dear those evenings before the fire we build to gaze upon while Piaf draws from these books the treasures of knowledge.”

By the end of the year, when Edith turned twenty-three, it may have struck her that, unlike Bourgeat, Asso asked more than he gave in return. In his own account of this period, the composer had become her “moral jailer”—talking her into submission to his regime by claiming that it was for her own good. Years later, he said that he had “committed professional suicide” to devote himself to Edith. She remained faithful to him, despite the tensions in their partnership. But by the spring of 1939, when Edith was again performing almost nonstop, his vision of her as his creation had become too constraining.

Reviewing Piaf’s April engagement at the Européen, the critic Léon-Martin said that her place in the music world was now established. He noted the presence in the audience of groups of mobilized soldiers on leave. Perhaps they saw themselves in Asso’s characters, his devil-may-care legionnaires. Though there was not yet a distinctive Piaf sound, audiences liked programs in which Asso’s réaliste songs and evocations of exotic lands were interspersed with lighter numbers that showed off Piaf’s talent as a comédienne and, as her tone became less nasal, the increased richness and roundness of her voice.

Edith’s Cyrano was mobilized in August, when she was singing in Deauville. While Asso joined his unit in the French Alps, she continued her tour to Ostende, Brussels, and back to Deauville, by which time the Germans and the Soviets had concluded a Nonaggression Treaty. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. On September 3, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. As France entered the period known as la drôle de guerre—the funny, or phony, war—Edith continued to sing the songs that Asso had written for her. But she had turned the page on their relationship, perhaps