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Piaf’s January 4 concert at Carnegie Hall, an exceptional event at this shrine to classical music. Though she performed two of Dréjac’s songs, his lilting “Sous le ciel de Paris” and the rocking “L’Homme à la moto” (while gripping imaginary handlebars), the singer’s black dress established “a stark mood,” in the view of the New York Times, which dubbed her “the high priestess of agony.” The Times critic seemed surprised when the huge audience nonetheless responded “with an enthusiasm which proved that heartbreak makes the whole world kin.” Almost in spite of himself, he praised the congruence of her persona, repertoire, and gestures—which were “of such naturalness and rightness that the performer’s whole body is merged into the essence of the song.” Won over by the end, after twenty-two songs in both languages, he allowed that watching the star, “You are no longer in Carnegie Hall but in a bistro on a side street on the Left Bank.”

The next day, Edith flew to Havana, where she was booked for two weeks at the Sans Souci, a bucolic club outside of town that drew gamblers, Hemingway admirers, and fans who came to hear such performers as Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, and Dorothy Dandridge. Dréjac’s reappearance in Havana caught her by surprise. They quarreled, she accused him of being possessive. “Edith had already noticed someone else,” Danielle Bonel recalled. “The page had been turned.” Edith then took up with Dréjac’s replacement, the guitarist Jacques Liébrard—a member of her orchestra since 1953. Her intimates explained these affairs as necessary to her art: “She always needed someone to love in her own way,” Barrier observed. “It wasn’t just sexual desire or because she loved to be in love, as some have said.” Being far from Paris made it easier to forget that both she and Liébrard had spouses, though his union, with a woman twenty years his senior, had never been formalized.

Edith wrote Bourgeat from Mexico, where she was booked for February, that she hesitated to tell him of certain things—such as her transfer of affections from Dréjac to Liébrard. “I’m caught in a struggle with my conscience,” she explained. “All I know is that each time it’s more difficult to find happiness. Maybe I ask too much of life.” But now she had a lover “with so much class that I feel overcome with admiration. That’s what I’ve always lacked, being able to admire the man I love (except, of course, Marcel).”

In her struggles with her conscience, Edith did not forget her husband. From Mexico she counseled Pills about his next recital. He should send her copies of his songs, “so I can listen to your new repertoire.” Meanwhile, she told him to limit his movements and simplify his gestures: “The more sober they are, the more true they’ll be.” Above all, he should be himself—a recipe that always worked to her advantage. She hoped that her “little man” would take her advice: “I so much want you to be wonderful.” “I love Mexico more and more,” she added: “It’s a magnificent country!” Enthralled by the rhythms of Latin music and adored by her audiences, Piaf performed at three clubs in the capital, the Capri, the Patio, and the Tenampa, where she was adopted by the mariachis with whom she sang “La Vie en rose” in Spanish and a brooding ballad with an antithetical moral, “La vida no vale nada” (“Life is worth nothing”).

Life seemed more than worthwhile when the star arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the end of March for a two-week engagement at the Copacabana Palace. “I found a marvelous country,” she told a French radio host. “It was the first time I said to myself, ‘I could live here.’ ” Each night her fans covered the stage with flowers; for them she sang “La Vie en rose” in Portuguese. But on May 6, after two more weeks of concerts in São Paulo, Piaf flew back to Paris via Rio, Recife, Dakar, and Lisbon, thus ending her fourteen months in exile.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1956–1959

In exile, Edith had absorbed the New World’s rhythms while focusing on her art, the privilege of the foreigner to whom local concerns do not have the same resonance as