No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [6]
Successive generations of foreign artisans absorbed the locals’ proud spirit. In revolutionary fashion they tutoied each other rather than use the vous of polite society, and expressed their solidarity in Belleville slang, a coded language reflected in the songs that Line and other goualeuses bawled out in the streets, the Café de la Liberté, the Vielleuse, and the other social centers specializing in gros rouge.
Differing accounts of Edith’s childhood all emphasize the importance of gros rouge in both her paternal and maternal lineages. Though we cannot know for certain whether Aîcha dosed Edith’s bottle with wine to make her sleep, it is likely that a fair amount of it was consumed in their household. Both men and women tippled to get through the day, especially during the war years, when food was scarce and heating almost unavailable. It is easy to imagine Line’s choice to keep warm in the cafés while earning whatever their patrons could spare, rather than stay at home with her infant daughter. At twenty, she was more interested in becoming a singer than in being a mother.
Opportunities for enjoyment were not lacking in wartime Belleville. Tales of life there may be colored by nostalgia, but the area in those days is still recalled as a “miniature nation … whose insignia could have been the red paving stones, a giant bottle of gros rouge, a vegetable seller’s cart, and an accordion.” The shared experience of grinding poverty made residents all the more likely to live for the moment. All looked forward to the event that brought relief from the workweek, the rue de Belleville’s Sunday fair, animated by vendors’ cries in praise of their vegetables, smells of fresh bread and cuts of meat in the baker’s oven, the tang of pastis emanating from café tables, and the scent of lilacs perfuming the hillsides in spring. Singers like Line plied their trade as customers made their way up the steep cobblestone street and, in a burst of generosity, granted their favorites some change.
The record does not say whether Louis came home from the war on leave, only that by the time he returned from the front in 1918, Annetta had left him and turned Edith over to Aîcha (later in life, Piaf would say that her mother left when she was two months old). Louis found their little girl sickly and malnourished. Aîcha, who made ends meet by cleaning apartments, had been spending her wages in the cafés and leaving Edith alone at home. In the different accounts of her removal from Aîcha’s care, Louis, his younger sister Zaza (one of the retired acrobats), or both of them together rescued Edith and took her to Bernay, the conservative Normandy town where her Gassion grandparents had recently settled after turning the page on their lives as itinerant showmen.
The Gassions were not always wanderers. The family had lived in the Calvados region of Normandy since the seventeenth century, most often in Falaise, the birthplace of William the Conqueror. In the years just before Edith’s birth, her grandparents had forsaken the circus for a more sedentary life in Caen, where they sold groceries, coal, and hardware. But their life as shopkeepers did not erase their notoriety. The neighbors gossiped; the taint of the circus followed them when they moved again to Bernay, where Léontine Gassion found employment as the manager of a maison close—a position on the fringes of a provincial society that deplored the brothel’s existence while taking advantage of its services.
Edith’s grandmother, known as Maman Tine, took the sickly child into this unusual household but never gave her