No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [59]
In September, she upheld her reputation in a solo stint at L’Etoile with the songs composed by Contet and Monnot for Etoile sans lumière, including the rousing “Chant du pirate,” with Piaf as pirate chief, and “Adieu mon coeur,” a torchy farewell to love and to the time when vagabond rhymed with chanson. The opening-night audience was so enthusiastic that they kept on shouting “Bravo!” A Paris-Presse reporter wrote: “She deserves her success. Her voice is unique, sonorous, incisive, tossing off notes like birdsong that reach to the farthest seats in the house.” Awed by her dramatic ability, he praised her enactment “of a distress that has more to do with the soul than with the world.” When Chevalier came to applaud her, she told the audience how honored she was to sing for him; two weeks later, Montand accompanied her to dinner at Chevalier’s apartment.
It may have seemed that Piaf had nothing to fear, but two days before Montand was to follow her as the star attraction at L’Etoile, an adverse critique of her show there appeared in Spectateur. Her new songs were too literary, the critic wrote, too remote from her days as La Môme Piaf. She should jettison these pretentious tunes (Contet’s) and revive her old repertoire, with its cast of “small-time hoods and whores … things that are simple and true.” The arty new Piaf was “impossible,” he concluded, “too far removed from my poor dear little Môme Piaf, who was once as real as life itself.”
The day after Yves’s opening night at L’Etoile, Edith left on a tour of the north of France and Belgium. On October 28, La Dépêche de Paris hailed him as “the strongest personality to have emerged in music-hall since Charles Trenet’s now distant beginnings.” Perhaps coincidentally, Montand cabled Edith in Brussels to end their affair: “Maybe you’re right,” the cable read. “I’m too young for you. With all my heart I wish you the happiness you deserve.”
The next day Edith wrote to Jacques Bourgeat about the breakup and included Yves’s telegram with her letter. It was just as well, she rationalized. His way of breaking off revealed his character, or lack thereof: “A telegram … is easier than a letter, a letter takes too long, you dictate a telegram, what thoughtfulness, what a way to think about love.” Though her sarcasm barely disguised the blow to her pride, she declared herself better off without him. “I’m desperate to devote myself to my work.… My lovers cost me far too much!” But she needed Bourgeat’s support: “I hope … you can stop seeing me as a strange little phenomenon and know that I am a woman in great pain who feels very much alone.”
Piaf was more charitable toward Montand in her memoirs. Recalling his joy in the audience’s acclaim at L’Etoile, she said, “I shall always be proud of having played a part in his success.” But after this attempt at kindness, she quoted a remark of Chevalier’s: “There are those who say … ‘It’s taken you a while to get to the top,’ and those who say, ‘You got there fast.’ Have you noticed that it is the first who are one’s real friends? They’re my pillars of strength, the ones who know I’ve had to work hard.” In her own voice, she observed that “a sense of métier, which has to accompany talent, cannot come from nowhere; it has to be acquired gradually.”
Piaf may have believed that Montand had reached the top too fast (and at her expense), but friends observed that their relations followed a familiar pattern. “When Edith managed to get from someone what she hoped to obtain,” Danielle Bonel explained, “there wasn’t much left for her to do. When she had nothing more to say or to impart, that person no longer interested her.” Having played Pygmalion to her lover/protégé/partner, she would watch him continue his climb to fame without her.
Piaf celebrated her thirtieth