The Streets of Paris

Édith Piaf: Rue des Cascades

LOCATION: 72, rue de Belleville, The Hills of Belleville, Ménilmontant, and Rue Oberkampf

MÉTRO: Belleville; Ménilmontant; Belgrand; Filles-du-Calvaire

Belleville gets a bad name from people who’ve never been there or who feel threatened by diversity. Immigrants and refugees from all over—Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Greece, Armenia, Poland, Russia, Auvergne and many French provinces—have settled here and worked side by side throughout the last two centuries. And still they come. The cobblestone high streets are dense with vendors, children, neighborliness; headscarfed women, bearded Orthodox men, artists, squatters, students, teachers, vagrants—people stop in the street and markets to pass the time of day. Historian Richard Cobb has called immigrant Belleville/Ménilmontant (which includes the nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements as well as the tenth and eleventh, both down the hill)—“the high citadel of l’esprit parisien.”

Édith Piaf (1915–1963), considered by many the greatest of the great French singers, began here. And forever, she said, Belleville was inside her.

From the beginning (December 1915, the second year of World War I), Édith Piaf’s existence—her birth name was Édith Giovanna Gassion—was enough to make you weep. As a baby, a child, and an adolescent, she was a starveling. She needed affection and food; she received almost nothing except neglect. As an adult, this utter deprivation left her yearning for love, always looking for human tenderness, no matter what kind of man was offering, and, after a while always needing comforting addictive substances. Her fans adored her because she sang from the heart about what every human being knows: pain, suffering, despair.

In 1915 her father was away in the war. Her mother was a penniless street singer who left the baby day and night either alone or with her mother; by the time Édith’s father returned in 1918, the mother had abandoned the child. (Later it was said the mother left when Édith was two months old, an abandonment that haunted Édith Piaf for her entire life.) The father, finding the child malnourished and weak, moved her to his mother’s house in Normandy. The house was a brothel. The grandmother showed her new charge no affection, the father returned to his itinerant life as an acrobat and circus man. Other children threw stones at Édith, this “child of the devil’s house.”1

At four, Édith was already singing in public, at night standing on tables in cafés with her grandparents. She also sang for the prostitutes she lived with and who were kind to her. They said she had a “magical” voice, that she could remember song lyrics as well as any grown-up.

Her housemates, les filles perdues (the lost girls), and her grandmother took her to Lisieux, the Carmelite shrine of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, the “Little Flower,” whom they implored to cure Édith of the acute keratitis (an inflammation of the cornea) that made her blind. After a number of unsuccessful pilgrimages, when she was about four or five years old, Édith’s eyes opened at Lisieux: she could see. The lost girls and Édith believed the saint had performed a miracle for her. For the rest of her life she prayed to Saint Thérèse, wore her medal, and professed herself a person of faith though she didn’t practice Catholicism. “My faith in something bigger, something stronger and more pure than what exists on this earth”—her faith in that “world beyond” she called immense according to her biographer. In times of crisis, she visited Paris churches to ask God for help. She claimed that “miracle” at Lisieux was her first and, for many years, her only happy memory.

When Édith’s father, Louis Gassion, showed up in Normandy, he took his seven-year-old daughter on the road with him, as part of the Caroli Circus. Louis was an acrobat and contortionist with a short fuse; Édith kept house in their trailer, sang a few songs, passed the hat. When she made a mistake, he smacked her around. Then, in a temper, he quit the circus and he and Édith went on the road as a vagabond itinerant duo. He stood on his head; the little girl sang racy songs, “La Marseillaise,” “L’Internationale.” He picked up girlfriends, brought them along. In interviews and memoirs, Édith described those years on the road as an education: she learned “street smarts” and how to survive among many different kinds of people, mostly outcasts like her and her abusive father. Refusing to give in to adversity—to crumble—became a theme of her life as it was the ethos of the streets of Belleville/Ménilmontant.

They returned to Belleville—father, new girlfriend, daughter—when Édith was ten. She learned how to belt out the ballads called chansons réalistes—sad, sentimental songs about the hard lives of workers and their lovers. Édith was pretty much on her own, earning her way by singing in the cafés along the boulevard de Belleville, in the squares of Belleville and Ménilmontant, which adjoins Belleville from the east on the steep hill of rue de Ménilmontant, a continuation of rue Oberkampf in the eleventh.

Despite her skinny, small body—she never grew taller than four feet eight inches—Édith had a deep, strong voice—someone called it “assaultive,” another a “velvety vibrato”; she had the defiant, saucy manners of the Belleville street. The locals in the cafés and music halls of her home territory cheered her on. But usually she was almost penniless. She got pregnant, married the father, took a room in Romainville, then later in the eleventh. They ate out of cans.

Word spread beyond Belleville about this birdlike singer with the haunting voice. “That kid sings straight from the guts,” Maurice Chevalier, who grew up in Ménilmontant, exclaimed the first time he heard her perform.

This was in 1935, two years after she’d moved out of Belleville. “This stinking poorhouse”—she wanted to get as far away from it as she could. And yet the compassion came through in her songs, her identification with the “underclass”—she may have moved but she never left her birthplace. When she moved to upper Montmartre and then Pigalle, a district of pimps and prostitutes and the mafia, she had her toddler daughter Cecelle with her. She nursed her, took her along as she traveled from gig to gig on the métro. Soon, the father of the child reclaimed her, bringing her back to Belleville where the baby died of meningitis, a paralyzing loss to her teenaged mother. There was no comfort (and almost no money) on the streets of Pigalle. She had the baby’s coffin blessed in Saint-Pierre-de-Montmartre, a small ancient church tucked into the back of Sacré-Coeur; she buried Cecelle in a pauper’s grave.

In the next few years, thanks to radio broadcasts and the records produced by Polydor, she was discovered, lionized, idealized, exploited. All along she would have many lovers, favoring men in uniforms, and three or more husbands. Her first manager, a fatherly gangster, gave her the name that he felt suited her: she was a true Paris sparrow, un moineau. He used the slang sparrow: piaf. “La môme piaf”—“The Little Sparrow” or “The Piaf Kid”—who made the sign of the cross before she entered the stage the night of her first real opening, in her ratty black skirt and hand-knitted sweater still missing a sleeve. Her first song was straight out of Belleville: “Les Mômes de la Cloche.”

We’re the poor girls, the poor kids

We roam around broke,

We’re the outcast girls

We’re loved for a night, it doesn’t matter where.

The “bravas” that cheered the song about her own life story roared through the cabaret. That was the night Maurice Chevalier first saw her perform.

She learned the art of singing, wrote some of her own songs, worked long hours with her composers and lyricists. But she never learned the conventions of the bourgeoisie. She was indifferent to saving any of the money she earned. She gave it away, to her father, her mother—a street singer who had become a drug addict and a hysterical stalker beneath Édith’s windows—to friends, relatives, and hangers-on. Bums on the sidewalks of New York received nothing less than a twenty dollar bill the times she came to sing in Carnegie Hall.

During World War II, she supported and hid Jewish friends. She traveled to Germany to entertain the troops, carrying with her phony identification cards, maps, and compasses given to her by the Resistance to hide on her person and give to imprisoned soldiers who were then able to escape. After the war, during the épuration, purge panels accused her of collaboration just for traveling to Germany. Proof from 118 prisoners of war who had escaped because of the material she carried to them and the cash she contributed saved her career. The penalty of proven collaboration would have been the removal of her songs from French radio forever and perhaps imprisonment.

For the Traveler

According to legend, she was born at 72, rue de Belleville (there’s a plaque), a short steep climb up from the main street, boulevard de Belleville. Bearing right into rue Piat (your back to the spot where Édith’s mother supposedly went into labor), it’s another easy hike up to the entrance of the lovely Parc de Belleville. It has a higher view over Paris than Montmartre.

But you’ll find Édith Piaf’s actual rather than legendary birthplace in a hospital another half-hour walk away into the southeast—you can descend through the park (in June, the roses are gorgeous, the many children so full of fun) to the exit into rue des Couronnes; then zigzagging north, then southeast through the old streets of Ménilmontant you’ll come into rue de la Chine where Hôpital Tenon extends to rue Belgrand. The no-frills Place Édith-Piaf facing the trafficked rue Belgrand makes you wonder if Paris meant this square to celebrate or mourn the life of its most famous singer.

The down-and-out Place Édith-Piaf, however, is in many ways appropriate as a nod to Belleville’s most revered international celebrity. She did not abandon Belleville. She returned often to visit her father whom she said she never stopped loving.

Because the policies of Léon Blum’s Popular Front government had brought reforms to the working classes in the thirties—higher wages, a shorter work week, health care, soup kitchens—Édith Piaf in later years did not see the same destitution on the streets of Belleville and Ménilmontant that she had grown up with. But these hills above Paris were still a world apart, still true to their history as the site of revolution and union protests. (Hitler had planned to bomb the northeast—it had no factories, was good for nothing but rebellion and Resistance; he hated the windmills of Pantin.)

Walking up these hills and zigzagging east and west, you can still feel yourself in an outsiders’ quartier: in the almost rustic simplicity of the backstreets and their plain houses you’re feeling the pulse of the working-poor world that shaped Édith Piaf. A route she would have known and serves as an enlightening example of both the charm and the dreariness of these outskirts begins about midway up rue de Ménilmontant off to the left behind the beautiful church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix. You are at the beginning of the rue de la Mare, an old riverbed that ran into a pool (mare) on the spot where the church now stands. The bookstore/gallery “Le Monte-en-l’Air” (with an outdoor terrace), at 2, rue de la Mare sits in a curve of the street. The shop has a first-rate collection of French literature, especially poetry. As Piaf began to write her own lyrics and work on improving her French, she became an ardent reader of poetry, reciting Baudelaire with one of her best friends/lyricists; she loved Ronsard; her close friend Jean Cocteau (who made a movie for her), recited his poems to her; she in turn recited the classic French poems she had memorized.

Leaving the bookstore, wind right and along the rue de la Mare. A stairway crosses over the old railroad tracks—l’enceinture—behind the bookstore. Rue de la Mare’s uphill curves continue until you come to Place Henri-Krasucki, named for a Polish immigrant. Krasucki (1924–2003), a hero of the Resistance, was deported to Germany and tortured brutally in the presence of his mother. He escaped and returned to Belleville to become secretary of the Communist Party and a fierce supporter of workers’ rights. The square was named for him in 2005, at the intersection of five streets: rue Levert, rue de la Mare, rue des Envierges, rue des Couronnes, and rue des Cascades. Local elders say that the square has not changed a lot (except for the cars) since the early twentieth century when Édith Piaf was young, singing and passing the hat in the squares of these hidden streets. Locals hang out in Les Mésanges at 82, rue de la Mare, a low-key pleasant bistro, serving good food (mesanges.krasu@free.fr).

Bear right into rue de Savies, empty, quiet, and mysterious in the late afternoon. At the top of it is the Regard Saint-Martin (1722), a small stone building with a pointed roof. This was an inspection point at the place where springwater flowing down from the hills was collected and carried to Paris in an aqueduct built by monks. As you walk, you pass old stone walls covered with moss, patches of wild grasses, and deserted gardens. Bear right again into the charming rue des Cascades, with its many springs and a few more stone buildings that were part of Belleville’s acqueduct in the time of Philippe Auguste (1180–1223). Rue des Cascades looks like a set for a film about Old Paris. (Jacques Becker had it in mind when making Casque d’Or [1952] with Simone Signoret.)

The street leads back into rue de Ménilmontant just above where this walk started. Descend toward boulevard de Ménilmontant—where, a block to your left is rue des Panoyaux, another movie set of a street, beautiful in its simplicity. (At no. 15 you’ll find La Boulangerie—www.laboulangerie.fr—a fine old restaurant, formerly a bakery, closed Mon, Sat lunch, and Sun.)

Jean Genet offers a poetic introduction to the walk out of Ménilmontant and up and down the hill of rue Oberkampf in the eleventh arrondissement where Édith Piaf once lived and sang when she was nobody.

Giacometti and I … know that there exists in Paris, where she has her dwelling, a person of great elegance, fine, haughty, vertical, singular and grey—a very tender grey—known as Rue Oberkampf, who cheekily changes her name and is called higher up Rue de Ménilmontant. Beautiful as a needle, she rises up to the sky.… she opens up as you climb, but in a singular manner: instead of retreating, the houses converge … truly transfigured by the personality of this street, [they] take on the quality of a kind of goodness, familiar and distant.2

To your left, as you head downhill (walking west) is 5–7 rue Crespin du Gast and the off-the-beaten-track Musée Édith Piaf (closed June and Sept., open erratically, 1–6, Mon and Weds). The museum is filled with old photographs, clippings, mementos, one of Piaf’s stuffed teddy bears, some little black dresses.

So many nearby streets in the eleventh—rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, in particular—have retained their personality against the onslaught of gentrification that endangers—and has destroyed—the soul of many old neighborhoods. Named for a steel workers’ union leader and a Résistant who sang the “Marseillaise” as he faced the firing squad at Châteaubriant in 1941, his hill street is a dynamic ethnic mix, with a few good cafés. Cannibale, no. 93, has music at night and an interior full of light.

Near the corner of Oberkampf and rue Saint-Maur (named for the seventh-century Abbaye de Saint-Maur in the southeast of the eleventh), if you turn right, you can follow it northwest down to l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, founded and designed by Henri IV, its courtyard an exact copy of his Place des Vosges; leaving the hospital, you’re a block away from the lovely Canal Saint-Martin in the tenth.

Returning to rue Oberkampf, you pass a few lively cafés near the corner of rue Saint-Maur, Chez Justine and Café Charbon, serving simple good food, their interiors and surrounding streets popular for their energetic night life. Across avenue de la République and avenue Parmentier, Oberkampf continues along its downhill slope, past small food shops, fruit markets, pâtisseries, florists, parents pushing strollers—some hurrying downhill, others uphill in the direction of Belleville. The motion of bodies flowing along these streets brings to mind the ballet called La Voix that was once planned as an homage to Piaf; it featured dances set to songs she would sing in celebration of the street life of Paris—the people, kiosks, métros, shops, the Parisians’ habit of strolling around—a kind of lighthearted sung dance. La Voix, never finished, was seen on French TV after her death.

Rue Amelot is off to your left a block before you reach the end of Oberkampf at boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire. It is a narrow street of secret passages, impasses, and tragedy: walk down to no. 36 (passing four separate stairways leading up to boulevard Beaumarchais, which must have served as escape routes) and read the plaque on the restored building. During the Occupation, a shelter for hunted Jewish mothers and children—Le Comité Amelot—operated here under the direction of David Rapoport from the Ukraine, who was arrested and deported in June 1943. The rest of the staff was also deported in the following months but not before they’d sent the children and their mothers to safe hiding places throughout France and Switzerland.

Returning to rue Oberkampf, passing the legendary bistro Le Centenaire on the corner, you turn to look up toward the top of the hill where you started out: Genet’s words about Oberkampf ring true. “Beautiful as a needle it rises up to the sky.” The view is especially moving at dusk, just before dark, and again the next day, as the sun rises to cover this cheeky person in brilliant morning light.

This is a quartier of workers, artists, shopkeepers, young freelancers, and families. Rue Oberkampf and its side streets are vital with diversity, an unaffected courtesy, and good humor. The luxury shops just a block away on boulevard Beaumarchais (the continuation of boulevard des Filles-du-Calvaire) threatens the eleventh’s identity. Residents look on the expensive new eateries and clothing shops as a blight.

For now we’re still on Édith Piaf’s turf, remembering her music. In the spirit of the eleventh and Belleville/Ménilmontant, some of it celebrates the je-m’en-foutisme (“I don’t give a damn”) street culture of northeastern Paris. Many of her songs are “tough-minded,” as Carolyn Burke puts it, born of these streets, “a refusal of sentimentality.” The people of this quartier saw themselves in Piaf; in Charles Aznavour’s words, they heard her “anarchic laughter.” Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong cherished her as a great musician, they flew from New York to Paris to catch her last triumphant shows at the Olympia.

When her hearse passed through these streets on the way to Père Lachaise in October 1963, forty thousand mourners followed it, closing the streets of Paris for the first time since the Liberation. Her coffin held her tiny body, her medal of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and her stuffed animals. The hearse did not stop at the Belleville church—Saint-Jean-Baptiste at the top of rue de Belleville—where she’d been baptized and her father’s death had been blessed with the Mass of Christian burial. The Vatican refused the request for a funeral Mass for his daughter: She had lived in a state of sin, it said, and as an icon of false happiness. Besides herself, her grave in section 96 holds her father and her baby daughter.

Nearby

SQUARE DE LA ROQUETTE Five minutes away from the Roquette entrance to Père Lachaise along boulevard Ménilmontant. Piaf’s people sit on the benches at the entrance on rue de la Roquette. The “History of Paris” plaque tells the story of the women’s prison that once stood here, a facility for “incorrigible” girls, and later, during the Occupation, four thousand women of the Resistance. The guillotine across the street is now just a marker in the sidewalk. The flower gardens are lovely in season, the shouts and laughter of children in the playground a kind of music.

LE LABO DE L’ABBÉ 25–27, rue Oberkampf, on the left as you head up toward Belleville. An Emmaus House foundation, the work of Abbé Pierre on behalf of the Paris poor and homeless, with many Paris and international outlets. The sale of the secondhand merchandise supports fair housing. Headquarters is in Romainville (where Édith Piaf lived with her baby).

HÔTEL BEAUMARCHAIS 3, rue Oberkampf. Tel: 01.53.36.86.86. www.hotelbeaumarchais.com. A friendly, modestly priced hotel, with an outdoor café. A minute from métro Filles-du-Calvaire and two minutes from the Marais. Within walking distance of Bastille in one direction and Place de la République in the other.

CIRQUE D’HIVER (Winter Circus) 110, rue Amelot. Exquisite architecture (built in 1852), unusual circus events, attended by Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and swarms of families on public holidays.

IMAGIGRAPHE 84, rue Oberkampf. Excellent Librairie & Contemporary Art Gallery.

À LA BOULE MAGIQUE 98, rue Oberkampf, 75011. An inviting, funky jewelry boutique. Christine is the helpful owner/proprietor.