Letters Provide New Window Into Edith Piaf's Torrid Love Life

Edith Piaf fans will soon have a new window into the French singer's dramatic love life through a series of 54 letters she wrote to world champion cyclist Louis Gerardin between 1951 and 1952.

Piaf's earlier affair with boxer Marcel Cerdan, who died in a plane crash in 1949 while en route to visit her in New York, is widely known. But far fewer people were aware of the torrid relationship she had two years later with Gerardin, also a married man.

Love letters of French singing legend Edith Piaf are pictured on May 29, 2009 at Christie's auction house in Paris.

Stephane De Sakutin, AFP / Getty Images

Love letters of French singer Edith Piaf are shown in May 2009 at Christie's auction house in Paris. Piaf, known for her doomed romances, addressed the letters between 1951 and 1952 to champion cyclist Louis Gerardin.

"Darling, I think I can say that never has a man taken me as much, and I believe I'm making love for the first time," the singer wrote in one letter dated January 1952, The Telegraph reports.

Portions of the letters were first made public in 2009 when they sold at Christie's in Paris for 59,000 euros. The collection will now be published in April in the French book "My Blue Love," a reference to a phrase she used to describe Gerardin.

As a measure of her love, Piaf wrote in one letter that she would give up drinking and settle down for the cyclist, whom she called Toto.

"I made an oath in Church that if you came I would never touch another glass of alcohol in my life," she wrote.

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Gerardin's fervor for the singer, of whom he once said, "Forty-eight hours with Piaf are more tiring than a lap in the Tour de France," apparently began to simmer as she demanded that he leave his wife. Finally, in 1952, she wrote him a letter informing him that she had married the singer Jacques Pills.

"I warned you thousands of times you were going to lose me but you never reacted," she wrote. "I hope with all my heart you are not wounded."

Piaf's turbulent life, which was the subject of the 2007 film "La Vie en Rose," is also chronicled in a new biography, "No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf," by Carolyn Burke. The author describes the singer's life, which began in the slums of Paris, as a "latter-day version of 'Les Miserables.' "