Piaf love letters as ardent as her songs

A volume of love letters written by Edith Piaf has been published in France. Photo / Supplied

Edith Piaf did, it appears, regret many things. The great diva of la chanson Francaise craved a "normal" life with children, and a cycling champion for a husband, according to a volume of her love letters published in France.

"You have rescued me just in time. I have sworn in Church that I will never touch another glass of alcohol [if we marry]", Piaf wrote in 1952 to French pursuit cycling champion Louis Gerardin. She promised to "transform" and spoke of having "pretty curtains, a beautiful dinner service".

The letters - not the first Piaf love epistles to be published but among the most frank - also speak with the familiar, uncompromisingly passionate voice of her songs. She writes of her adoration for Gerardin's "beautiful thighs" and "pretty buttocks".

"No man has possessed me as much as you," she writes. She finishes another letter: "Je t'aimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmme" with 16 m's.

On April 13, 1952, Piaf wrote: "This is what I would like before leaving for America. To be so worn out, so filled with love, that I cannot make love any more for months but await my marvellous return to be with you again like your little pet dog."

Piaf's affair with Gerardin lasted less than a year in 1951-52, a decade before her celebrated song, Je Ne Regrette Rien, and 12 years before her death.

When she met the champion cyclist, the singer was badly off the rails. She had plunged into extreme alcohol and drug abuse following the death in a plane accident of her previous lover, the boxer Marcel Cerdan.

Piaf evidently saw Gerardin as the man to return her to the straight and narrow. "I want to completely better myself, I want to be worthy of you, you must help me to transform, you will be my little professor, dear, and I will blindly listen to you like a master that I adore," she wrote in January 1952.

But there were two obstacles to a happy ending - Gerardin was already married, and he seems to have been dazzled but also exhausted by Piaf. He was reported to have said that 48 hours with the singer was "more tiring than riding in the Tour de France".

The 54 letters, were sold to an unknown buyer for €67,000 ($123,755) at Christies in Paris in 2009. They have now been published in a book called Mon amour bleu (My Blue Love).

Piaf's love of Gerardin is one of her lesser known romantic adventures. She was 36 when she met the blond, blue-eyed cyclist. He was 39. Calling him "Toto" she often expresses a wish to marry and have his children. She also occasionally reveals remorse for the sufferings of Gerardin's wife, Bichette. The affair ended in September 1952 when, engaged to the French singer Jacques Pills, she wrote to Gerardin: "When you receive this letter I will be married."

- INDEPENDENT