About
Despite numerous published biographies, many facts and events of Édith's life are shrouded in mystery. She was born "Édith Giovanna Gassion" in Belleville, Paris, the high-immigration district later described by Daniel Pennac. Legend has it that she was born on the pavement of Rue de Belleville 72, but her birth certificate states she was born at Hôpital Tenon, the Belleville arrondissement hospital. She was named Édith after the executed British nurse Edith Cavell. Piaf—a Parisian colloquialism for "sparrow"—originated as a nickname she would receive twenty years later.
Her mother, Annetta Giovanna Maillard (1898 – 1945), was a partly-Italian, seventeen-year-old native of Livorno, a port city on the on the western edge of Tuscany, Italy. She was working as a café singer under the pseudonym, Line Marsa. Édith received her middle name of Giovanna from her mother. Louis-Alphonse Gassion (1881 – 1944), Edith's father, was a street acrobat with a theatrical past. Little Édith was soon abandoned by her parents, left for a short time with her maternal grandmother, Mena (probably a Kabyle). Shortly thereafter, Édith's father took the child to his mother, who ran a brothel in Normandy, and he then joined the French Army (1916). Thus, Édith was in contact with the prostitutes and the various attenders of the brothel since her early years, a circumstance which must have had a deep impact on her personality and view of life.
From the age of three to seven Édith was blind, and from eight to fourteen she was deaf and suffered from severe androgenetic alopecia. According to Piaf's biography she recovered her sight after her grandmother's prostitutes pooled money to send her on a pilgrimage honoring Saint Thérèse de Lisieux in what is known as a "miraclulament" in French. In 1929, at fourteen, she joined her father in his acrobatic street performances. She then took a room at Grand Hôtel de Clermont (18 rue Veron, Paris 18ème) and separated from him, going her own way as a street singer in Pigalle, Ménilmontant, and the Paris suburbs (cf. the song "Elle fréquentait la Rue Pigalle"). She was about sixteen years old when she fell in love with a delivery-boy, Louis Dupont. Shortly afterward she had a child, a little girl named, Marcelle, who died tragically in infancy of meningitis.
|
