For the French, she was the embodiment of the suffering and hope that infused their tortuous emergence from the recent historical humiliations of war and Occupation. For the Americans, whose cultural influence was then beginning to dominate the West, she was both a nostalgic figure of their own dream of the individual’s potential to rise from poverty to fame and prosperity, and the symbol of a more universal (and Hollywoodian) optimism: the resilience of the human heart, its ability to recover over and again from brokenness, and to remain open to love. The Eiffel Tower concert was not Piaf’s last by any means, but it is a telling example of the spiritedness of an artist who has come to mean so much to so many.

Born Edith Gassion in 1915, Piaf received what became her lifelong stage name from her first real promoter, Louis Leplée, in 1935. Until that time, with little going for her except a remarkable voice, she had worked, with modest success, at singing herself out of the social destitution into which she had been born; but Leplée took her off the streets and into the professional life of the clubs. It was a rare piece of good luck for Piaf, but it launched her into the journey that would transform her into the most successful and adulated singer of her era. One does not have to be a psychologist to understand the incurable messiness of her personal life: her childhood, devoid of maternal affection and any steady guidance from her circus-performer father, left her with an insatiable need for love, translated into an endless stream of lovers, with whom she found snatches of happiness and repeated disappointments. There were continuous setbacks: her only child died in infancy; Leplée was the victim of a sordid and unsolved gangland murder; the one man Piaf truly loved, the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a plane crash when flying to join her; her best friend, Simone Berteaut (‘Momone’), along with many others in her entourage, exploited her financially and betrayed her friendship; her two marriages were singularly unfulfilling; she contracted crippling arthritis early in life and had generally awful health, made worse by years of dubious self-medication.

What kept Piaf going was her faith – religious faith; she never lost her very simple Christian belief in redemption and a life after death. But it was her faith in music that drove and sustained her; the conviction that her voice, more than a talent, was a vocation to express, exorcise, and transcend, for herself and others, the sorrows and yearnings of the human heart. 

With an exemplary thoroughness that draws on a much wider range of sources than have previous biographies of Piaf, No Regrets documents both the life and the career, not as separate entities, but as the tangled intertwining that they were. The book shows that Piaf became as celebrated in the United States as she was in France. As a biography, it is conventionally chronological, but it embeds Piaf’s story into the broader and weighty historical contexts of a France struggling to find something of its former lustre in the postwar years, and an America becoming overwhelmingly confident in its own arrival as a political and cultural superpower.

Many will be surprised to learn that Piaf sought wisdom and inner peace by reading Plato and Homer as well as the French classics, but perhaps the most compelling thread of Burke’s account is the emphasis given to Piaf’s musicianship. If the voice was a natural gift, it was one that Piaf constantly developed and honed over her lifetime, along with every aspect of her performances. This professionalism, together with great personal generosity, allowed her to mentor others, including singers as prominent as Yves Montand, Charles Aznavour, and Georges Moustaki. There was nothing amateurish in her approach to her material or to her collaborators; whether in writing the words for her songs, working with composers, building, expanding, and rehearsing her repertoire, she was clear-headed, austere, and rigorous. This is how she was able to sustain the intensity and directness that the public and so many of her fellow artists wondered at – and continue, generations later, to admire.

No Regrets provides ample analysis of the words of many of the songs that Piaf made famous (transcribed in both French and English); there is a wealth of well-chosen quotations illustrating her impact, and an excellent selection of photographs. None of this can quite match the grip of the Voice itself when it hammers out the madness of Padam! Padam! Padam! or stretches scathingly across the social chasms of Milord. For me, the trajectory of Piaf’s music is something like an analogue in sound of Picasso’s evolution as a painter, from the wrenching romantic waifs of the Blue Period to the anguished figures of Guernica and beyond. It would, of course, be unfair to expect any biography to transmit what only the art itself can do. Those who already know and love Piaf will find in Carolyn Burke an attentive, informative, and passionate fellow-traveller. For those yet to discover Piaf’s world, No Regrets, as well as being a reliable and accessible introduction, has all the ingredients of a pressing invitation.