Paris Laughed When Edith Piaf Married Him. Then They Heard Them Sing Together. D

When the news reached Paris in October 1962, the response was not gentle. Edith Piaf, 47 years old, visibly unwell, a figure who had become in her last years as much a subject of public concern as of public administration, had married a 26-year-old former hairdresser named Theophanis Lamboukas. The press did not handle the announcement with restraint.

The mockery was specific and unkind in the way that Paris in 1962 could be unkind when it chose. The age gap, the disparity in status, the questions about what the young man wanted and what the dying woman believed. He was, the commentary noted, approximately half her age. He was good-looking in an obvious way.

He had not yet established himself as a performer in any serious sense. She was Piaf, the obvious reading was the obvious reading, and Paris read it. Théo Sarapo, the name came from the Greek sarapo, meaning “I love you,” and Piaf had given him the name as she had given him the career, appeared to confirm the suspicions of the skeptics simply by existing in the shape he existed in.

Young, handsome, attached to an older woman whose wealth and fame were considerable, and whose health was such that what the wealth and fame were attached to was not expected to persist for very long. The column inches were not sympathetic. Piaf understood what she had married and what the marriage would look like from the outside.

She had not arrived at 47 in the French entertainment world without developing a thorough understanding of how the French entertainment world formed its opinions and expressed them. She had been the subject of its opinions for 30 years. She knew the specific texture of its disapproval, its condescension, its willingness to apply the most reductive available interpretation to any situation involving a woman and a man and the difference between their circumstances.

The Olympia in Paris was not a small room. It was the theater where Piaf had staged the famous 1961 comeback. The shows that the record producers had said would fail and that had produced one of the most celebrated runs in the history of French chanson. The audience that packed it understood the building’s significance. They knew what it meant to stand on that stage and what it meant to receive the Olympia audience’s judgment.

The room carried weight. When Piaf was in it, it was the right room for her to be in, large enough to absorb the fullness of what she gave, established enough to confirm the scale of what the giving meant. Piaf and Sarapo sang the duet at the Olympia in late 1962. The audience that came had been hearing about the marriage for months.

They had read the commentary. They had formed their opinions or received the opinions that the commentary had provided. They came, not entirely without curiosity, perhaps, but also not without the specific resistance that an audience brings when it has been told what to think about the people it is about to see.

The song began. Piaf’s voice came first, the voice that the audience knew, that they had come for, that was the reason they were in the room. And then Serapo’s voice came in. And what happened was something that the audience had not, on the basis of what they had read and what they had been told, been expecting.

He could sing. This was not what the commentary had implied. The commentary had implied a series of things about Theo Sarapo, and none of them had been he can sing. He was not Piaf. He was not the voice that the audience had come to hear. But he was a voice. A voice with a specific warmth, a straightforwardness, a quality of directness that the lyric of the duet required, and that he brought to it without affectation.

When he asked the question, “A quoi sert l’amour?” He asked it as someone asking a question, rather than performing the asking. The duet worked. She had met Sarapo in 1961. He had come into her orbit through the overlapping circles of the Paris entertainment world. The world of small clubs and demonstration singers, and people who were working towards something without yet having a clear way to reach it.

He was, when she encountered him, someone who was not yet anyone in particular in that world, but who was willing to work, and who had, in addition to the obvious attributes that the commentary would emphasize, a quality that people who knew him described in terms that the commentary did not use. A genuine warmth, a carefulness about other people, a seriousness underneath the easy surface.

Piaf recognized things. She had been recognizing things in people since Leplee had recognized something in her on a corner near the Champs-Elysees. She recognized something in Sarapo. She did not explain herself. She had not in general made a practice of explaining herself to the people who disapproved of her.

She had made a practice of continuing to work. And the work was the answer to the disapproval in the only form she considered worth offering. The stage, the performance, the thing itself rather than the argument about the thing. This had been true when she came back to the stage 3 weeks after Surtan died. It had been true when she recorded in 1962 when the doctor said to stop.

It was true now. The answer was not words. The answer was what they did when they got on stage together. They performed together. This was the part that the commentary had not anticipated and that the audiences, when they encountered it, were not fully prepared for. The song was “A quoi ça sert l’amour?” What’s the use of love? It was a duet written for two voices, one asking the question, one answering it.

The structure of the lyric built around the simple form of two people talking about what the thing between them is and whether it makes sense. The song’s construction is deceptively plain. The words are direct. The argument is not complicated. What the song depends on is the quality of the two voices and the specific credibility of their relationship to each other.

The sense, when both of them are singing, that the conversation is not a performance of a conversation, but the actual thing. The room went quiet. Not the silence of an audience that has been unmoved, the silence of an audience that has been reached and is taking in what it is received without yet knowing how to respond.

The mockery that had been in the room when they walked out did not dissolve politely. It was simply overwritten by what the song produced. In the specific way that the actual experience of a thing overrides what you had been told about the thing before you encountered it. An audience that arrives with resistance and receives the actual thing undergoes a specific kind of shift.

It is not a dramatic reversal. It is quieter than that. The gradual displacement of a prepared position by the accumulating weight of what the ears are receiving. By the middle of the duet the prepared positions in the Olympia audience were being displaced. The question the song asked “What’s the use of love?” was receiving an answer that the audience had not arrived prepared to receive.

And they were receiving it anyway. The marriage lasted less than a year. Piaf died in October 1963. She was 47. Sarapo was 27. He had been with her through the last year, the last recording sessions the last performances the last months when the body was failing. He had cared for her. The accounts of the last months are accounts of someone who did not treat the marriage as the arrangement the commentary had described.

He was present. He managed the household and the medical appointments and the practical weight of a life that was becoming increasingly difficult. He was the person who stayed. The commentary had predicted a man who would be absent when the circumstances were difficult. The circumstances became very difficult.

And he was not absent. After she died, Sarapo continued to work. He performed. He recorded. He found his way into the professional life of a French performer who was known not for independent achievements of the scale that her career had produced, but for the specific thing he had done, the duet, the voice heard beside hers.

He died in a car accident in 1970. He was 34. The song “A quoi ça sert l’amour” is still listened to. The listener does not hear the commentary or the age gap or the year the marriage happened or the year she died. The duet does it on the basis of the two voices and the words and the specific quality of the conversation the song enacts.

A conversation about love that sounds in the recording like something the singers actually believe. Piaf had been answering questions her entire career by doing the thing rather than responding to the question. From the street corners of Belleville to the Olympia stage, the answer was always the same form.

Not the explanation, not the defense, not the argument, but the performance. Paris laughed. Then Paris heard them sing. And what Paris heard was the song making the case that the song knew how to make, quietly, directly, without argument, in the only form that ever worked.