No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [81]
Edith’s conviction of love’s divinity was already being tested in her Boulogne household. Soon after her return from New York, she contacted Marinette Cerdan, who invited her to Morocco even though she knew of Edith’s affair with Marcel. Their entente as co-mourners resulted in the Cerdan family’s moving to Boulogne. Edith took responsibility for their welfare (including benefits like a mink coat for Marinette) out of her desire to give the boxer’s sons the life he had wanted for them and also to show the world that his widow embraced the woman who had been her rival. Only conventional minds found their rapport hard to understand, she wrote: “Marinette and I had been changed by [the same] man.”
By the beginning of May, with Momone suffering the consequences of an overactive love life and Cerdan’s son Paul needing an operation, Edith wondered if she had taken on too much. “I don’t know if I’m an artist or everyone’s mother,” she told Tony Frank. She was praying for a solution to his financial woes; meanwhile, he should read Marcel’s favorite, The Keys of the Kingdom. Love was “more precious than money,” she continued; he had “a real fortune” in his daughter. Edith trusted her lover enough to tell him about Cécelle’s death, a subject she rarely mentioned.
Momone’s unexpected pregnancy meant that there would soon be five children in the house, she told him a few days later. She would have to turn the living room into a dormitory; meanwhile, she, Momone, and Marinette were all knitting. The star wished that she could drop everything and spend time with Tony, especially now that Momone was quarreling with Dédée—who would soon leave Edith, after ten years in her service. Submerged in “this bitch of a life,” Edith wrote, she found solace at church: “It’s the only place where I can draw new strength.”
Her current run at the A.B.C. and her new records lifted her spirits somewhat, especially “Hymne à l’amour.” In the first recording of the song she had written for Cerdan, the orchestration and choruses create a mystical sound that builds to the coda, where, on an almost Wagnerian note, Piaf exalts love’s ability to outlast death. “Playing with a very effective use of rubato and the alternation between vocal power and restraint,” a critic writes, “Edith Piaf’s interpretation is highly expressive, in complete accord with the ecstatic intensity of the words.”
Piaf’s mood often darkened when she returned to Boulogne, where she spent most of her time with Momone. “When she knows that I’m sad, she is all the more so,” she told Tony Frank. “I see the reflection of my pain in her eyes. It’s amazing, don’t you think, a friendship like this brings one comfort and makes up for a lot?” But she also yearned for the warmth of Tony’s “beaux yeux,” a phrase that recurs in her letters and may have inspired her to compose “C’est d’la faute à tes yeux”—the confession of a woman who tells her dead lover that she killed him “because of your eyes.”
With Momone as her mirror, the singer’s moods were reflected back in ways that worked to her old friend’s advantage. Having regained her ascendancy, Momone found that she could share Edith’s largesse with the Cerdans, who returned to Morocco some months later with suitcases full of presents. In this context, Tony Frank’s reluctance to exploit his liaison with Piaf seems admirable—though he may also have found her idea of l’amour too exalted. “We live in a time when money and business are more important than feelings,” she told him. Being deeply in love meant that “nothing matters except the beloved,” she wrote when he started backing away from their relationship.
Only one man had loved her as she wished, Edith wrote on May 26. “I will never again encounter such a wonderful thing,” she continued, because men were so “petit.” Because of their spiritual smallness, they could not compare with this “grand” member of their sex (there was no need to name him), who had done