No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [41]
Emer prolonged his departure to see Piaf introduce his song on opening night, February 16. After several numbers by Asso and Monnot, she launched into “L’Accordéoniste.” With the first refrain—“Ça lui rentre dans la peau / Par le bas, par le haut / Elle a envie de chanter … / … C’est une vraie tordue de la musique” (“[The music] gets under her skin / From her head to her toes / She feels like singing … / … She’s just nuts about music”)—she ran her hands up and down her slender form. Until then, Piaf had held her hands at her sides. Now they enacted her possession by the music, her abandonment to it. With a minimum of gestures, she sketched the fille de joie’s bliss, then her unbearable sorrow.
Piaf’s intensity is still palpable in recordings of ‘L’Accordéoniste,” especially the wrenching sob of the last lines. “The response was delirious,” Emer recalled. Piaf asked the composer to come onstage and introduced him as a soldier about to go to the front; the crowd applauded all over again. He and Piaf became close friends; he would write many of her favorite songs. “Her kindness to me was outstanding,” Emer said years later. Though she was despotic in rehearsals, she would always go out of her way to help him.
At twenty-four, the diminutive singer already had a commanding presence—often too commanding, especially when she broke all the dishes during an argument to provoke a reaction from her lover. (Meurisse bought more china at the Galeries Lafayette, knowing that Edith was likely to smash it as well.) “Living with him changed the way I looked at life,” she told a reporter. “His indolent courtesy was so completely different from all the rogues I had known in Montmartre … that I soon fell in love with his face, that of the favorite child. It bore no relation to my old ideas of the perfect man but opened the doors to a world of refinement, whose existence I had never imagined.”
Still other doors opened for her. One evening Madame Raoul Breton, the wife of Piaf’s music publisher, asked her to dinner to meet Jean Cocteau, at his request. The “prince of poets,” who often sought new energy in popular art, was as entranced with Edith as she was with him. By the end of the meal they were addressing each other with the intimate tu. A friendship began that evening that would last the rest of their lives.
Piaf was a being of “regal simplicity,” Cocteau wrote. On first hearing her, he was stunned “by the power emanating from that minuscule body,” and by her eyes, “the eyes of a blind person struck by a miracle, the eyes of a clairvoyant.” Edith was flattered to have the leader of the artistic avant-garde enamored of her; she admired his elegance, his erudition, his wide-ranging artistic gifts. That winter, Cocteau often visited Piaf and Meurisse after their gigs at the cabaret. The poet was “at the summit of art and intelligence,” Meurisse wrote. “To know him was to enter the realm of magic.” Since Cocteau equaled Molière in Piaf’s opinion, she asked him to write a song for her, as she had done with Bourgeat: surely men of learning who wrote poetry would also be good at songwriting.
Cocteau would instead produce a one-act play for two actors based on Piaf’s relations with Meurisse, whose icy calm suggested the title, Le Bel Indifférent. Originally conceived as a chanson parlée (a “spoken song”), the play is a monologue directed at a “handsome, indifferent man” by the lover he ignores—Piaf’s role. “A magnificent gigolo on the verge of no longer being so,” he reads his newspaper while she becomes increasingly