No Regrets - Carolyn Burke [96]
As if their marriage were about to resume, Pills greeted his wife at Orly with a bouquet of flowers. Their long-deferred reunion took place amid the embraces of Edith’s close friends Marguerite Monnot and her husband, the music publisher Raoul Breton and his wife, and Cerdan’s sons. Since the increase of anti-French hostility in Morocco, the Cerdan family had been living in Edith’s apartment, looked after by her majordomo, the new cook, Suzanne, and Suzanne’s daughter Christiane, the femme de chambre. Piaf moved back to the Boulevard Lannes with Pills that night, and a week later appeared with him on television to perform “Et ça gueule, ça, madame,” the song she had written when they were first a duo.
Within a few days, she began rehearsals for her next engagement, at the Olympia, to start at the end of May. “I was scared, much more so than for Carnegie Hall,” Piaf told a reporter. In the fourteen months she had been gone, much had changed: “There were new songs, new stars. How was I to find my way?” Only the thought of all that she had overcome in the past allowed her to go on.
The star need not have worried. Her Olympia audiences, only too glad to embrace the môme from Belleville who had conquered America, welcomed her with a standing ovation. The singer’s voice resonated through the large, dark theater, a spectator recalled: “It was galvanizing; the high notes seemed to come from her guts rather than her mouth.… By her seventh or eighth song I was in a trance.”
Piaf’s new songs, several of which she had tried out in the United States, invoked popular myths. “L’Homme à la moto” struck a markedly “American” note with its driving tale of the motorcyclist who meets his death despite the pleas of his sweetheart. “Les Amants d’un jour” also ended badly—with the lovers’ suicide—yet its alternation of major and minor keys juxtaposed a vision of absolute love recalled by Piaf’s persona, the woman who watches the ill-fated lovers from her place at the bar of a tawdry hotel: “Moi, j’essuie les verres / Au fond du café / J’ai bien trop à faire / Pour pouvoir rêver / Mais dans ce décor / Banal à pleurer / Il me semble encore / Les voir arriver.” (“Me, I wipe the glasses / At the back of the café / I’ve too much to do / To dream my time away / Yet in this sad décor / It’s enough to make you cry / I can still see them / When they first passed by.”) Piaf also sang her classics, including “L’Hymne à l’amour,” which brought down the house. Her comeback was such a success that the management extended it for another month.
In a telling contrast to her triumphant return, Piaf’s empty apartment struck a visitor as “the image of a separation.” Earlier that year, Pills had told the press that he had had to leave her in the States to fulfill his contract. On June 6, the couple issued a press release announcing their plans to divorce. “We reached this decision together,” Piaf told reporters. “We’re apart too often because of our engagements.” What she did not say was that she had lost interest in Pills and that he could no longer bear