A flame that burned for a hundred years — the many stories of Edith Piaf

Rain soaked cobbles on a cold December night, the pale light of a streetlamp illuminating a policeman’s cape on which reposes a newborn infant, exposed to the elements. A humble nativity at the foot of a flight of steps in Belleville, the babe a true child of the streets who would be destined for greatness, whose frail cry would grow into one of the most recognisable voices in the world. Such is the myth of the birth of Edith Piaf, the unrivalled mistress of French chanson who could make your heart break with a single note, who was as adept at creating romances through song as she was at embellishing stories about her life. The fact that she was actually born at the slightly less picturesque Tenon hospital is now widely known, but somehow people forgive Edith and those around her for the tales they carefully wove over the years. Around someone so small, great histories accumulated, as if she was a minuscule point of light radiating beams of fantasy, myth and dreams. With Edith it’s the magic that matters more than the exact detail even now, a hundred years after her birth.

The visceral quality of Edith’s singing is what draws people to her recordings still. It is raw and expressive, often with a quivering timbre that seems to force itself from her petite, bird-like frame, as if an enormous energy is contained within her that must break out. You listen to her singing “No Regrets” and you admire her defiant, almost proud intonation. You believe her when she says that the past has been swept away and today she will start again, such is the power of her complete performance. This is her sorcery and she worked hard at the witchcraft over the years. Reading the first attempt she made at an autobiography, published in English as “The Wheel of Fortune”, you perceive an artist keen to be taken seriously. She carefully selects the right songs, then strives to interpret them correctly through her tone and gestures. Accounts abound of her rehearsing through the night, her constant companions in the wee small hours being a piano and a group of musicians, composers and various hangers-on, all bound up in her relentless drive to achieve perfection. She was committed to her art and really quite serious about it. Her voice sounds like one of plain honesty, not subterfuge. So how did elements of the fantastic creep so far into her life?

Drama certainly followed Edith from the start. Her unconventional parentage, with an acrobat father and street-singer mother, led to a colourful upbringing amongst neglectful relatives, prostitutes and circus folk. Long journeys about rural France would have left plenty of time for a vivid imagination to develop. An itinerant existence shines a powerful light on the recesses of the brain where tall tales dwell. There is a comfort in piecing together narratives and in resolving stories happily, sometimes with a grain of truth thrown in and sometimes not. For the little girl constantly on the road, the early art of the storyteller grew into an ability to bring alive a song for an audience. It also left behind traces of the embroiderer of childhood narrative tapestries in the powerful mind of a talented, driven and sometimes reckless adult.

That Edith did not lead a particularly sober, temperate existence is one fact that has been well documented. Indeed it was the key reason given for her being denied a funeral mass by the Catholic church. However, in contrast to her high living she was actually a woman with a deep faith. She liked to offer prayers to St. Therese of Lisieux, appropriately the exponent of the “Little Way”. Therese’s writings and poetry are forever extolling the virtues of being small, of making oneself insignificant in this life in order to gain favour in the next. Insignificant Edith could never be, but her small stature and frailty must have drawn her to the “little flower” saint who was also slight and sickly of body, but still managed to be highly influential. The story goes that Edith was cured of a bout of blindness in childhood after a pilgrimage to the shrine of Therese, organised by the working women in her grandmother’s brothel. Doubts have been cast on this, but as a foundation for saintly devotion it makes sense. It is another of those interesting and memorable Piaf tales in which love (of sorts) gives rise to a miracle. It is indeed a good story.

One of the crucial things about good stories is the satisfying bridge that they make between how things are and how we would like them to be. In her wildly inventive book “Piaf”, Edith’s friend Simone Berteaut writes of visiting her as she lay dying. Edith telephones “Momone”, as she called her, requesting her immediate presence. Momone flies through the night to the South of France and treks to the remote hamlet where her friend from teenage years is now staying. The have an emotional reunion, talking for hours about the good times. Edith’s young husband joins them and appreciates how beautiful, deep and special their friendship is. The gut wrenching thing is that this is not even remotely believable. Even in the absence of the truth the reader can tell straight away that this is what Momone wanted to happen, rather than what actually did. Momone did go and see Edith at this time, but she came unannounced and unwanted. Their meeting was tense and brief, Edith having fallen out with the woman some years previously. Momone was overall considered to be a very bad influence on Edith, encouraging her to drink excessively and behave raucously. Perhaps she felt guilty about this and needed to write about an imaginary reconciliation. Perhaps she just regretted not being able to reconnect with the companion of so much of her life before it was too late. Either way, she concocted a scene that surely made her feel better about the passing of someone with whom she had a very strong bond and a long history.

Such was Edith’s pull that all who crossed her path effectively became characters in a great story. She was always directing and manipulating her cast to a degree, be it moulding the latest young male singer to walk into her life into the perfect performer and lover, or persuading one of her songwriter friends to rehearse until the point of exhaustion. When her creative spark met with that of another, a veritable blaze of art often resulted, as when her great friend Jean Cocteau wrote the play “La Bel Indifferent” for her and her lover Paul Meurisse. This spark is the image that the film director Olivier Dahan constantly returns to in his film “La Vie en Rose” — a spark, a flame, a fire, a spotlight — lights in the darkness and prayers offered up to St. Therese through the mist. One tiny spark that caught alight, one flame that burned, one tiny woman who made the whole world listen to her as she gloried in the burning glare of fame. Her personality was one of bright intensity, her life an incendiary of stories, some true, some not, but all part of the memory of Edith Piaf and all reasons why she is so beloved even long after her death. This is the flame that we still try to kindle a hundred years after her birth, through the fantasy and the reality and with no regrets for either.

Bibliography
The Poems of St. Therese of Lisieux, translated by Alan Bancroft
Piaf by Simone Berteaut
No Regrets by Carolyn Burke
A Cry From The Heart by Margaret Crosland
The Wheel of Fortune by Edith Piaf