Édith Piaf

Édith Piaf: Four Foot Eight, Audible at the Back

When she died in October 1963, the traffic in Paris stopped. Charles Aznavour, who owed her his career, said it was the only time since the end of the Second World War that the city had come to a complete standstill. Tens of thousands lined the funeral route and more than a hundred thousand crowded Père Lachaise. The Catholic Church had refused her a Requiem Mass. It took the Church fifty years to change its mind.

The Brothel at Bernay

She was born Édith Giovanna Gassion on 19 December 1915 at the Hôpital Tenon in Paris, and named for Edith Cavell, the British nurse the Germans had executed that October for helping Allied soldiers escape. Her father, Louis Alphonse Gassion, was an acrobatic street performer from Normandy. Her mother, Annetta Maillard, sang and worked in circuses as Line Marsa, and abandoned her at birth.

After a spell with her maternal grandmother in Normandy, Piaf was raised in her mother's family brothel in Bernay, where — the record is blunt about this — the ten or so women working there helped look after her. Between the ages of three and seven she is said to have been blind from keratitis. The account she gave for the recovery of her sight was that the prostitutes paid for a pilgrimage to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and that she was miraculously healed.

At fourteen her father took her onto the streets of France with his acrobatic act, and she began singing to the crowds. At fifteen she met Simone Berteaut, and the two worked the pavements together for years. At seventeen she had a daughter, Marcelle, who died of meningitis at two.

Leplée

In 1935 a nightclub owner named Louis Leplée heard her singing in the street. She was 142 centimetres tall — four foot eight — and terrified. He described the voice as *comme un moineau*, like a sparrow, and gave her the stage name La Môme Piaf, Paris slang meaning roughly the Sparrow Kid, with a faint sneer built into it. He also told her to wear a plain black dress, which she never stopped wearing. He publicised the debut hard, with Django Reinhardt in the band and Norbert Glanzberg at the piano. Her first two records appeared the same year, one written by Marguerite Monnot, who became her closest musical collaborator.

In April 1936 Leplée was murdered by mobsters with connections to Piaf. She was questioned as a possible accessory and acquitted, but the press did serious damage. To rebuild she brought in Raymond Asso, who became her lover, cut off her dangerous associates, changed her name to Édith Piaf, and had Monnot write material drawn from the life she had actually lived. That is the moment the artist was invented: a street singer reconstituted as the voice of *chanson réaliste*, the song of love, loss and the gutter.

The Occupation

Her fame grew under German occupation, and the circumstances were not clean. She sang in nightclubs and brothels frequented by German officers and French collaborators — Le Chabanais, Le Sphinx, One Two Two. She joined a German-sponsored concert tour to Berlin. By 1942 she could afford a luxury flat in the 16th arrondissement, above a nightclub and bordello near Gestapo headquarters.

In October 1944 she was hauled before an *épuration légale* tribunal, with plans afoot to ban her from the radio. Her secretary Andrée Bigard, a Resistance member, testified for her: Piaf had performed at prisoner-of-war camps and helped prisoners escape, and had paid to move the Jewish composer Michel Emer — who wrote "L'Accordéoniste" — to safety before the occupation closed in. She was acquitted, and by December was singing for Allied troops in Marseille alongside Yves Montand.

The Songs

"La Vie en rose" (1945), whose lyric she wrote herself in the months after the war ended, entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. Around it stand "L'Accordéoniste" (1940), "Hymne à l'amour" (1949), "Padam, padam..." (1951), "La Foule" (1957), "Milord" (1959), and "Non, je ne regrette rien" (1960), premiered at the Olympia in 1961 during a run of concerts she gave specifically to save the venue from bankruptcy.

America was a harder sell. Britannica records her simply as "a French singer and actress whose interpretation of the chanson made her internationally famous," but the interpretation was the sticking point: American audiences expected spectacle and got a small woman in a black dress standing still. A glowing 1947 notice from the critic Virgil Thomson reversed her fortunes. She appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show eight times and played Carnegie Hall twice.

Cerdan

On the 1947 American tour she met Marcel Cerdan, the French middleweight world champion, married with three children. The affair was international news. In October 1949 he boarded a Paris–New York flight to see her; the aircraft hit a mountain near Santa Maria in the Azores, killing him and forty-seven others. In May 1950 she recorded "Hymne à l'amour" in his memory.

In 1951 she was hurt in a car crash with Aznavour in the vehicle, breaking an arm and two ribs. A doctor prescribed morphine for arthritis. She was already drinking. Two more near-fatal crashes followed. Her second husband, Jacques Pills, whom she married in 1952 with Marlene Dietrich as matron of honour, got her into detox clinics three times before the marriage ended in 1957.

The Protégés

She made careers. She gave the Argentine guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui his Paris debut in July 1950, launching a musician who became central to Argentine folk. She took Aznavour on tour and recorded his songs. She wrote the lyric to "What Can I Do?" for Yves Montand in 1947, and inside a year he was one of the most famous singers in France.

Why Édith Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the claim rests on interpretation rather than composition — a narrower and stranger gift than the word usually implies. Piaf wrote the lyric to "La Vie en rose" and a handful of others, but Monnot, Emer, Michel Vaucaire and Charles Dumont wrote the songs. What she supplied was performance.

What that performance consisted of is specific and can be described. She was 142 centimetres tall and stood almost motionless in a black dress, refusing every device of variety-hall spectacle, and she carried the largest halls in Paris and New York on voice alone — the thing that initially baffled American audiences and then converted them. She specialised in *chanson réaliste*, which is not a genre of emotional display but of testimony: songs about love, loss and sorrow delivered as though reported rather than acted. The reason critics reach for genius is that the material was routinely autobiographical and she performed it without visible defence. "Hymne à l'amour" for a lover killed in a plane crash; "Non, je ne regrette rien" for a life that had handed her a brothel childhood, a dead child, morphine and three car wrecks.

The counter-case is that this is not intellect at all, and Piaf never claimed it was. She left no theory, founded no school, and depended entirely on the writers around her for repertoire. Her instincts about her own life were catastrophic more often than not. Virgil Thomson's 1947 review is the nearest thing to a sustained critical case in the record, and it was a review, not a body of criticism. What she had was an instrument and the nerve to leave it undefended — which is as much a form of courage as a form of intelligence.

Legacy

She died on 10 October 1963, aged forty-seven, of liver cancer, at her villa in Plascassier on the Riviera. Her last husband, Théo Sarapo, twenty years her junior, reportedly drove her body to Paris in secret so that fans would believe she had died at home. Her reported last words: "Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for."

Cardinal Maurice Feltin denied her a Requiem Mass because she had remarried after divorce in the Orthodox Church. On 10 October 2013, fifty years to the day, the French Catholic Church recanted and gave her one at St Jean-Baptiste in Belleville, the parish where she was born. Marion Cotillard won an Academy Award for playing her in 2007. There is an asteroid, 3772 Piaf. Her grave at Père Lachaise remains among the most visited in Paris, and Celine Dion sang "L'Hymne à l'amour" at the opening of the 2024 Paris Olympics — sixty-one years after the traffic stopped.

Achievements

• Grammy Hall of Fame — 1998
• Notable work: La Vie en rose
• Notable work: Milord
• Notable work: Non, je ne regrette rien
• Instruments: voice
• Genres: chanson, chanson réaliste and ballade