No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [72]
For the next year, Piaf planned engagements in order to spend as much time as possible with Cerdan while also trying to evade the mounting public interest in their liaison. During the summer of 1948, between engagements in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, she recorded several songs written by friends whose lyrics allude to her romance with the man she called the love of her life. “Les Amants de Paris,” composed for her by Léo Ferré, let her ponder her role as a singer of love songs: “Les amants de Paris couchent sur ma chanson. / A Paris, les amants s’aiment à leur façon.” (“In Paris lovers go to bed with my songs. / In Paris couples make love as they wish.”) Ferré’s waltz ends with a request for more such melodies, so that Parisians can keep on making love: “Donnez-moi des chansons / Pour qu’on s’aime à Paris.”
About this time, Charles Aznavour brought Piaf “Il pleut,” a moody evocation of Paris in the rain, along with a more upbeat song entitled “C’est un gars” about “the guy” who entered her life. Its heroine, who sounds like a waif from Edith’s réaliste period, does not care that she is down at the heel. “A guy has come into my life,” she croons in the rising lines of the refrain, an “angel” who says what no one said before, that she is pretty. Recalling the past, she muses: “Je vivais depuis mon enfance / Dans les rues noires de l’ignorance. / Soudain, tout s’est illuminé. / Mon coeur se mit à chanter.” (“I’ve lived since childhood / In the dark streets of ignorance. / Suddenly all became light. / My heart began to sing.”) But the optimism of the final couplet may have seemed like wishful thinking: the “guy” asks the woman to spend her life with him, and she replies simply, “Oui!”
Despite the difficulty of organizing time with Cerdan, who was again in training, Edith remained in high spirits. In July, the fledgling television station Télé-Paris broadcast her concert of songs by Raymond Asso—who, with his new wife, joined her for the occasion—and a second program, with Roche and Aznavour. She slipped away to Brussels for Cerdan’s rematch with Delannoit, but stayed in her hotel room at the request of Lucien Roupp, his manager—for whom her presence in the boxer’s life was, as the headline said, a misfortune. (This time Cerdan won the match.)
In August, she arranged a week’s vacation at his training camp in Normandy. Ginou Richer, who accompanied her to the boxer’s hide-out, recalled Edith’s efforts to adapt to his schedule. She rose early, drank a glass of carrot juice, and took walks or bicycle rides. After his training sessions, they strolled in the fields of flowers surrounding their hideaway, played Monopoly (she let him win), and discussed the writers on Edith’s handpicked reading list—including Steinbeck (Cerdan liked In Dubious Battle) and Gide (of whom he asked innocently, “Do you think he might be gay?”). They made a secret pilgrimage to Lisieux to kneel at Saint Thérèse’s shrine; Edith asked the saint to take Marcel under her protection and bought the statue of her benefactress that would sit on her bedside table for the rest of her life.
Three days later, the boxer flew to New York to train for his match with Tony Zale, the world middleweight champion known as the Man of Steel. Roupp managed to keep Piaf from traveling with the fighter, but, despite her upcoming engagement at the Versailles, she flew to New York with Ginou and