No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [5]
Let us begin with the absent father, here identified as an “acrobatic artist.” Louis Gassion, a handsome man with a fine figure, was just under five feet tall. A foot soldier in the trenches of eastern France when Edith was born, he would be away during most of her infancy. After the war, his repeated absences would be explained by his life as an itinerant entertainer and his love of gros rouge (cheap red wine): “It was the rotgut that kept him going,” Piaf often said of her progenitor, whose diminutive stature she inherited (as an adult she measured four feet ten inches).
Louis Gassion had practiced his trade since childhood, having learned its tricks in the 1890s—when performers like Valentin le Désossé (the Moulin Rouge contortionist memorialized by Toulouse-Lautrec) entertained the masses. Piaf’s father billed himself as a contortionist but never achieved Le Désossé’s celebrity. Before the war he toured France with the Gassion family circus, which was based in Normandy under the direction of his father, Victor Gassion, an equestrian who also enlisted four of Louis’s young sisters as trapeze artists. His mother, Louise-Léontine Descamps Gassion, presided over their large tribe. If any photographs of Louis’s parents and their fourteen children were taken, none survive. Perhaps they were not sufficiently prosperous to record their lives in the manner of bourgeois families.
Louis’s flirtatious manner more than made up for his size. Just before the start of war in 1914, he met Annetta at a fair outside Paris where she sold sweets and occasionally sang while her mother, a Moroccan Berber sideshow artist known as Aîcha, presided over her own attraction—a menagerie of trained fleas that she carried about in a matchbox. Annetta’s official papers listed her father, an itinerant animal-trainer named Auguste Maillard, as deceased, and her mother (unlike the fleas) as having no fixed residence. Like other circus people, the Maillards had no place in the social order. Annetta may have sensed a kindred spirit in Louis, since her maternal grandparents had also been acrobats.
Annetta’s marriage to Louis was one of many unions consummated hastily in wartime. The groom was stationed in Sens, south of Paris and beyond the reach of the enemy troops that decimated Senlis (a widely condemned act of German barbarity) two days after their wedding on September 4, 1914. Edith’s December 1915 birth shows that the newlyweds had managed to be together the previous March. About this time they set up house in the rue de Belleville, around the corner from the sordid rue de Rébeval apartment where Annetta’s mother, Aîcha, lived.
The effect of the war on daily life was inescapable. The most impoverished Bellevillois lined up for the soupe populaire (soup kitchen), which was for some their only nourishment. Annetta called her baby Edith in homage to the war heroine Edith Cavell, an English nurse executed by a German firing squad that October for having organized an escape route through Belgium for wounded soldiers. Though Piaf appreciated being named for a much-publicized symbol of resistance, she disliked her second name, Giovanna—her mother’s gesture at passing on her lineage by giving her daughter her own middle name.
Of her maternal heritage, Piaf later wrote, “I’ve always thought that Fate led me to the very career that my mother dreamed of but could never manage, not through any lack of talent but because luck wasn’t on her side.” Annetta had had no choice but to follow in her parents’ footsteps, Piaf believed. She sang in the streets while Aîcha looked after the baby, and soon took the stage name Line Marsa, an exotic sobriquet inspired by the Tunisian seaside resort La Marsa. Line’s sultry manner suited her repertoire of drinking songs and torchy ballads—the kind of song called la chanson réaliste, which would make her daughter’s name some years later.
Line would have found appreciative audiences in Belleville. Since the 1900s, the neighborhood had absorbed several waves of immigrants: