No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [4]
CHAPTER ONE
1915–1925
Edith Piaf’s life began like a latter-day version of Les Misérables. A poor girl from the Paris slums, she grew up among the downtrodden souls who later populated her lyrics and, through their mythic resonance, shaped the scenarios of twentieth-century French culture. Her story is the stuff of working-class legend, its joys and sorrows the materials for her heart-stopping songs. From these impoverished beginnings, she kept her cheeky street sense and gaiety of spirit while reinventing herself as the chanteuse who reached across social, linguistic, and national divides to voice the emotions of ordinary people.
Though mythic, Piaf’s childhood was no fairy tale. Because the few known facts about her inauspicious beginnings are entwined with the legends that she and others cultivated once she became famous, it is often impossible to separate fact from fiction—an ambition that is probably beside the point, since her art and legend nourish each other, circling back to the streets where she got her start. Au bal de la chance (1958) and Ma vie (1964)—accounts of her life dictated to others—must be complemented by interviews with Piaf and her friends to help us grasp the contexts for the legends that grew up around her.
Edith Piaf was born during the second year of World War I in Belleville, a defiantly independent village in the eastern heights of Paris that remained, long after its annexation to the city in 1860, a bastion of revolutionary culture. Unlike Montmartre, the city’s other hilltop slum, Belleville did not possess a community of artists. With no Picasso to celebrate the area and no bourgeois visitors in search of bohemia, the village was left to its plebeian ways. Maurice Chevalier, who grew up nearby in Menilmontant, called Belleville “the capital of the outskirts of Paris.” Though the population was working-class, he wrote, it embraced all sorts: “A good honest fellow will live next door to the lowest pimp and respectable housewives line up behind streetwalkers at the baker’s.”
A similar taint of promiscuity colors the tale of Piaf’s infancy. “My mother nearly gave birth to me on the street,” she supposedly told a journalist, who would later remove the word “nearly” to create the well-known tale of her entrance into the world shielded only by the woolen cape spread on the pavement by a quick-thinking policeman. Later in life, when asked whether she had really been born in the street, Piaf neither confirmed nor denied the story, letting people believe what they liked. “She didn’t know very much about her childhood,” the composer Henri Contet said, and she liked to entertain the accounts the press reflected back to her—as if by studying them she might glean enough to fill in the sketchy tale of her beginnings.
A document registered at the Mairie (or City Hall) of the twentieth arrondissement, the administrative center for Belleville, gives a somewhat more reliable account—that of the little girl’s birth in the nearby Tenon Hospital. “On the 19th of December, 1915,” it begins, “the delivery of Edith Giovanna, daughter of Louis Gassion, ‘artiste acrobate,’ 34, and his wife, Annetta Giovanna Maillard, ‘artiste lyrique,’ 20, took place at 5 a.m. in the rue de la Chine” (the address of the hospital). The document, signed by the nurse who assisted at the birth and two hospital employees—“in the absence of the father”—gives the couple’s address as 72 rue de Belleville, the unimpressive building on whose steps her mother may or may not have gone into labor. Here the bare facts—the names, ages, and professions of the parents, their address, the time and place of birth—form the frame