Dispatches

By EMILY MITCHELL

Less than three years before she died, Edith Piaf found the song that became her anthem. Non, je ne regrette rien rang through Paris' Olympia Music Hall as the frail singer, weakened by illness and drug and alcohol abuse, sustained by injections and pills, made an emotional comeback. Night after night, from Dec. 29, 1960, to April 13 of the following year, the diminutive woman in her trademark black dress lifted a chalky face to the spotlights and bared her soul. "I regret nothing, good or bad. All is forgotten, I don't care about the past . . . I'm beginning again," she sang, and then, defiantly, "I am starting over again -- with you."

In a series of exhausting concerts that friends feared she could not survive, Piaf enraptured anew her greatest love: the French audience. Thirty years after her death on Oct. 10, 1963, at the age of 47, France has revived the romance. Record companies have rereleased her hits, and six of her nine films are on videotape. Observing the flood of visitors who have made the pilgrimage this year to Paris' modest Edith Piaf Museum, curator Bernard Marchois says that "it is as if she never went away." And in one sense, she has never left.

Two documentaries and at least six biographies have modified but not dispelled the mystique that trailed like a haze of cigarette smoke across her life. It began with the much told tale of her birth in the street in a rough- and-tumble section of Paris. A plaque at No. 72 Rue de Belleville, unveiled in 1966 by Maurice Chevalier, marks the spot, but a new biography reveals she was born in a hospital. All true, however, are the impoverished and cruel childhood, the early time spent as a prostitute and the death before age 2 of her only child -- a daughter she bore in her teens.

Played out in public, her extravagant affairs -- with actors, musicians and athletes -- added to the legend. But her legacy is the voice. Penetrating, with a wide, natural vibrato, it had an urgency of emotion that touched everyone, from the misbegotten of the meanest quartier to the most refined boulevardiers. Jean Cocteau, who died within hours of Piaf, called her a genius: "There has never been another like her . . . and there never will be." He compared her to a nightingale, but the impresario who discovered Edith Giovanna Gassion at 19, singing on the corner of a Paris avenue, had bestowed a more fitting name: Piaf, which in the city's argot of the 1930s meant sparrow.

Before falling to earth, the little sparrow soared to grandeur. She was an international star and the last in the line of French singers famous for chansons realistes, gritty songs about real people. They are stories of love lost, of city streets at twilight and tears at midnight. Suffering and ardor suffuse her music because Piaf performed the same way she lived, holding back nothing. "Je suis entiere," she once said, I am totally committed. Heard again, the husky, impassioned voice revives a fading dream of Paris. And for that, the French again clasp her to their hearts and will never let her go.

With reporting by Benjamin Ivry/Paris