France: The Sparrow & the Dilettante

“The ship is sinking,” Jean Cocteau mourned last week when he was told of Edith Piaf’s death. It was a typically melodramatic lament for the waning of a French world that began with cubism and ended, more or less, with existentialism. Several hours later, Cocteau himself died of a heart attack at the age of 74. In one day France had lost both an esthetic arbiter of its intellect and a guardian—or at least a mascot —of its heart.

Singing to Live. Hollow-cheeked and not quite five feet tall, Edith Piaf looked the part. She was born in wretchedness and squalor in a Paris working-class district, was abandoned by her mother, and lived in a brothel run by her grandmother. A childhood disease blinded her for four years, and at 16 she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, who died in infancy. Heartbroken, she began singing outside sidewalk cafés, lived on the coins tossed at her feet.

A café owner heard and hired her. He dressed his tiny discovery in a simple black dress and changed her name from Gassion to Piaf—argot for “little sparrow.” The scrawny singer with the hoarse, throbbing voice that seemed far too powerful for so small a source was an instant success. Soon all France was listening to her tender, shamelessly sentimental songs.

But even in success, la vie en rose eluded Edith Piaf. Her greatest love, Boxer Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a plane crash in 1949, and her first marriage ended in divorce. Four separate automobile accidents all but crushed her frail body, and she was racked with ulcers, jaundice, arthritis, and cirrhosis of the liver. She took to drugs and young men, married her second husband, Hairdresser Théo Sarapo, 25, only last year, when she was 46. Each misfortune marred her voice but only seemed to give new poignancy to her artistry. Despite doctors’ warnings, the nearly crippled singer insisted on going on tour because she had to “sing to live.” Said she: “Each pain gives something inside; the more pain you have, the more joy. Pain is an obligation.”

Best at Conversation. Pain seemed foreign to Jean Cocteau because it was in such bad taste. In the sweep of French life and letters, he was the incomparably protean, mercurial, acrobatic, magical virtuoso—”a one-man band,” as he called himself. He was the eternal dilettante—novelist, poet, farceur, essayist, film maker, actor, painter, sculptor, choreographer, composer, actor—and above all, talker. “Nothing he has written,” said one of his friendly critics, “is worth half an hour of his conversation.” He despised the limitations of professionalism. “The only way to make a good film is to know nothing about film making,” he once said. “Go straight at it unprepared, and ask for the impossible.”

He was born of rich bourgeois parents with a passion for the arts, at 20 published his first volume of poetry, La Lampe d’Aladin. Its success plunged the reedy young poet into the world of Proust, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Many give him credit for scattering ideas in a dozen surrealistic arts, but it will never be clear precisely who inspired (or copied) whom. Of Cocteau’s ballet, Parade, Andre Gide wrote: “Cocteau knows the sets and costumes are by Picasso and the score by Satie, but he wonders if Picasso and Satie are not by him.”

Living to Shock. Turned down for military service during World War I, Cocteau roamed the battlefields on his own, caring for the French wounded. After the death of his lover, Novelist

Raymond Radiguet, Cocteau took to opium, later kicked the habit and led a campaign against dope addiction. At moments he could be as sentimental as any Piaf song, which is why it was difficult to take him seriously as a poet of evil. Yet guardians of public morality damned his books (Les Parents Terribles), plays (The Infernal Machine), and films (Beauty and the Beast) as immoral and unhealthy.

Cocteau never stopped trying to shock the bourgeois out of their lethargy, and complained when they grew increasingly unshockable. “I have never caused scandal without premeditation,” he said. “I deem it indispensable.” Eight years ago, this determined, dedicated enfant terrible applied to the stodgy, conservative French Academy. “Since it is now fashionable to laugh at the academy,” he said, “I have remained a rebel by joining it.”

Grief for the Academician and the former street singer was nationwide—the French only bury their politicians but mourn their artists. With the deaths of Piaf and Cocteau, France had been robbed of two incomparable figures, whose joint epitaph might well be Piaf’s defiant song, Je ne regrette rien.