Love, Always Love

Singer Edith Piaf's tour of the French provinces was a disaster from the start. In Maubeuge. she lost her way among the lyrics of her songs and collapsed sobbing against the piano. At Le Mans, rumors spread that she had to be taken home in an ambulance. By the time she reached Dreux she was in a limbo between sleeping and waking--taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills for some semblance of rest, taking stimulants to shock her back into the raucous nightclub world that was her life. Her manager begged her not to go on; her musicians refused to accompany her. But the dowdy, husky-voiced sob-sister from the streets of Montmartre insisted: "If you don't let me go on, I'll kill myself."

So Piaf, 44, went on. And because she was Piaf, French newspapers followed her through every symptom. They had long since told the chronicle of her sorrows: the childhood blindness, the unhappy love affairs, the near-fatal auto accidents. They had recorded her illness in Paris in 1954, the collapse in Stockholm in 1958, last year's major surgery (for a gastric ulcer) in New York. Now the headline writers seemed engaged in a macabre watch. "Piaf suffers and refuses to capitulate," cried Paris-Journal. "Piaf falling like Moliere on the planks of the provincial coliseum*--that was worth the trip," blared the daily Liberation. France-Dimanche quoted the singer herself: "When the door closes on my last pal, when I find myself once more alone at home, I want to die like an animal."

Last week the Piaf endurance test that the papers had begun to call "The Defiance Tour" or "The Suicide Tour" was finally halted. The sad singer was taken to hospital for a rest cure--some 20 hours a day of drug-induced sleep. "Everything becomes a great white silence," explained France-Soir. L'Aurore printed a picture of the clinic, the name (Bellevue) showing clearly to attract the curious public, and an arrow pointing to Piaf's room.

"It is inhuman to have to sing about love, always love, with a heart completely empty, and so many memories," crooned France-Soir. But between the white silences, Edith Piaf insists that she intends to live a little longer with those memories. She promises to appear in Marseille next month, in Paris in February.

* In February 1673, the great French dramatist Jean Baptiste Poquelin, whose nom de plume was Moliere, ignored his failing health and insisted on acting in Le Malade Imaginaire, the last play he ever wrote. Unlike the hero of his comedy, Moliere, 51, was suffering from no imaginary illness. He had a convulsion on the stage of Paris' Palais Royal Theater, was carried home, where he died after a violent fit of coughing.

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