No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [91]
In December, better able to cope with the stresses of her career, Piaf spent her time preparing radio and television broadcasts and at the Pathé-Marconi recording studios. Of her new songs she particularly liked “Heureuse,” by René Rouzaud and Marguerite Monnot. Its view of true love as the shared experience of the best and the worst in life—“Le meilleur et le pire, nous le partageons / C’est ce qu’on appelle s’aimer pour de bon”—described her situation: rather than an ode to sensuality like “Je t’ai dans la peau,” it evoked the desire for lasting love. At Christmas, Pills welcomed the Cerdans as part of their extended family, which included Jacqueline Boyer, the daughter of his first marriage. The couple’s public and private lives seemed in balance. Though there was still something undomesticated about the star, she had created a home.
The year 1954 brought several occasions for looking backward. In January, Pathé-Marconi gave a reception to celebrate Piaf’s millionth record since her first recording session—at that time an unusual accomplishment, even for a singer of her renown. On the same occasion, Pills gave his wife a belated anniversary gift—bronze molds of her expressive hands, the bearers of the signature gestures with which she illustrated her songs. “Last time I asked for your hand,” he teased. “Today you’re getting two of them.” It was no doubt touching to receive sturdy duplicates of parts of herself that suffered arthritic pain yet fluttered like birds at each performance.
After touring the south of France later that month, the couple prepared for their spring season. In February, Piaf recorded a new song by Rouzaud and Monnot, “La Goualante du pauvre Jean.” “It was easy to write for Edith,” Rouzaud said. “She inspired you, and it was stimulating to work with Marguerite Monnot’s music.” His goualante, or “lament,” an updated medieval form, would be known worldwide as “The Poor People of Paris”—the homonyms of “Jean,” the poor man of the title, and gens (people) conveyed its universality. What was more, the song’s slangy lyrics suited Piaf’s persona, and its refrain—“Sans amour on n’est rien du tout” (“Without love you’re nothing”)—conveyed her personal and artistic beliefs.
By this time, the singer’s long-standing collaboration with “Guite” had resulted in twenty-seven songs composed together, and scores of tunes with lyrics by others since they had met through Asso. Like Piaf, Monnot had married. At the height of her career, she too was attempting to adjust to domesticity, though her husband, the singer Paul Péri, was as temperamental as Jacques Pills was calm. Monnot’s way of blending poetic feeling with popular form had enhanced the construction of Piaf’s persona. “Thank you for helping me to be Edith Piaf,” the singer told Monnot on a 1955 television show celebrating the composer’s life.
In 1954, the two women wrote “Les Amants de Venise,” on the mind’s ability to turn dross into gold, or a slum into Venice, and “Tous mes rêves passés,” an address to their former selves: “J’ai dépensé toutes mes illusions / Suis revenue riche de souvenirs.” (“I’ve spent all my illusions / I’ve come back rich with memories.”) Though successful veterans of a music business that had rarely welcomed women, each was at heart the fleur bleue of “Tous mes rêves passés”—a dreamy young girl in search of love.
Conjugating marriage and careers proved to be more complicated than it had seemed when Pills and Piaf remet in 1952. After her third stay in the clinic, the couple rehearsed for separate engagements in March, Pills at the Moulin Rouge and Piaf at the Alhambra. It