No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [54]
On March 31, she told Glanzberg, who was in hiding near Toulouse, that she had been unable to write until then because of her father’s death. “I loved him very much.… It’s terrifying to come suddenly face to face with what you cannot change.” Things were bad in Paris, worse than people imagined. “I hope this abomination will come to an end soon,” she continued. Only the thought of the songs that he was writing for her gave her any pleasure.
Throughout the spring, while performing at benefits for bombing victims and families whose breadwinners were doing forced labor in Germany, Edith continued to mourn her father. “She wasn’t up to getting together with the family to talk about our loss,” Denise reflected, “but she often went to the cemetery to put a bunch of violets on Papa’s grave.”
Denise had turned thirteen on the day of Louis Gassion’s funeral. When Edith learned that he had been looking forward to Denise’s first communion in May, she took Denise to Au Printemps, the department store, to buy her the traditional outfit—a white coat and dress, white shoes, and a gold cross. But on the day itself, too full of grief for her father, she could not bring herself to attend the ceremony.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1944–1946
Throughout the spring of 1944, as Allied bombers hammered the German war machine, French workers were shipped in increasing numbers to toil in German factories. Many of those who went underground to avoid the STO joined the network of Resistance groups operating under threat of discovery by the Gestapo. Despite the widespread sense that the Germans were losing the war, they still had the upper hand in Paris, where it was a struggle to survive each day. Many Parisians sought distraction at the theaters and cabarets. As the Gestapo rounded up Jews in increasing numbers, Parisians began to notice non-Jewish names on the hostage lists, which were bordered in black.
Edith alternated between nightclub engagements and benefits for bombing victims, STO workers, and the families of prisoners in Germany—including Stalag III-D, for whom she served as unofficial godmother. (Her black dress may have seemed doubly appropriate as she continued to grieve for her father.) Late that spring, she moved to an apartment near the Champs-Elysées—a less compromising address than Madame Billy’s. With the Allied invasion the topic on everyone’s lips, an apartment that could not be linked to collaboration with the Germans made sense. “We said goodbye as friends,” Madame Billy wrote. “She wasn’t easy to live with, but a star of her order has the right to behave as she likes.”
During the first week of June, as the Allies prepared for D-Day, Edith sang nightly at the Moulin de la Galette, in Montmartre. On June 5, the five hundred spectators crowded into the converted mill turned their attention to the tiny singer on the bare stage. Normally boisterous patrons became as silent as if they were in church while she chanted Contet’s “Y’a pas de printemps”—whose vision of a future full of springtimes was understood as a reply to the dark present. Piaf surpassed herself with Contet’s other new tunes, “Les Deux Rengaines” (the song’s two rhythms, one sad, the other gay, alternate like contrary views of life) and “C’est toujours la même histoire,” a classic love story. She gave the audience “powerful emotions,” a critic wrote, “at once solid and diaphanous.… Her heart-wrenching voice, its metallic tones, her reserved yet mobile face and eloquent hands have never been so powerful.”
This paean to Piaf’s mastery appeared just as news of the Normandy beachheads reached Paris. Her response was not recorded. Perhaps she was too busy to think beyond her next engagement. (Some years later, she would be asked to sing at the launch of the D-Day film The Longest Day, as if hers were the voice of France’s liberation.)
In July, the director of the Moulin Rouge signed Edith to re-open the cabaret, which had been functioning as a cinema.