No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [49]
Most afternoons, Marguerite Monnot arrived on her motorbike to work with Edith. The composer seemed oblivious to their surroundings except to note that the building was warm. Although she often showed up the day after appointments, Guite would come immediately when Edith phoned at 3 a.m. and stay at the piano until dawn. Once, she turned up on a new motorbike, fretting that it was someone else’s, but when told to return it to where she had found it, said she had no idea where that was. She wasn’t absentminded, she explained, just thinking about other things. Guite understood Edith perfectly: both women dreamed of finding the passionate romance celebrated in their songs.
Piaf spent her whole life yearning for a great love, Contet mused years later. Once she concluded that he was stringing her along, Edith took another lover—the young man named Yvon Jeanclaude who had sung backup on “C’était une histoire d’amour.” Contet learned that he had a rival when he arrived at Madame Billy’s one afternoon to find that Edith could not receive him. He turned the situation into a wry song entitled “Le Brun et le blond”: depicting himself as the blond with a dark-haired rival for the same woman’s affections, he gave the blond man the last word, the note he leaves when he decides that he has had enough. (In performance, Piaf raised one hand to her eye to signify tears, an economical but effective gesture.) She added the song to her repertoire along with Contet’s darkly poetic “Coup de grisou,” the tale of a coal miner’s failed romance, and “Monsieur Saint-Pierre,” a saucy prayer to heaven’s gatekeeper.
Edith became Contet’s muse and mentor in spite of their amorous ups and downs. He should not think of imitating Asso, she counseled; since his light touch did not suit the dark mood of réaliste song, he should follow his instincts. Pleased with the subtle direction his songs were taking, she was inspired to write several of her own, including two bittersweet glances at old amours, “J’ai qu’à l’regarder” and “C’était si bon”—a jazzy fox-trot that ends on an affirmative note with Piaf’s rising glissando on a single word to her man—“oui.” Yet at times Contet’s domestic commitments enraged her. One freezing day during the Christmas season, when he remained at his own home, Edith took off her clothes and stood on the balcony, supposedly to punish herself for sleeping with a married man.
Even so, Contet kept writing for his tumultuous muse, often with Monnot setting his lyrics in the kind of close collaboration that Edith enjoyed with members of her artistic family. Contet would continue to write for her long after the end of their affair. “We writers, what were we after all?” he said years later. “Our words stammered and stuttered; she turned them into cries and prayers.” Though she was often tyrannical with collaborators, Edith was always inspiring: “Her enthusiasm compensated for all the rest.… You ended up writing what she wanted.”
Piaf considered Contet a modern-day Ronsard, but she liked to distinguish between her two favorite lyricists. Emer wrote songs that spoke to the people; Contet gave her more subtle texts with refrains that one could hold on to. She sang works by both men during her engagement at the Folies Belleville in January 1943. Comoedia’s critic, who followed her career closely, found Emer’s “De l’autre côté de la rue” and Contet’s “Le Brun et le blond” rather difficult for audiences accustomed to more direct fare, though in his view these two songs opened her repertoire to “nuances of feeling … with mysterious, almost magical, notes.”
From the censors’ perspective, Piaf’s show the following month at the Casino de Paris was only too direct. The manager illustrated her songs by projecting images onto a screen behind her and sending dancers