"Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien"

In French "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" literally means "No, I Don't Regret Anything" in English, but it's a statement with many things to say. It can be comical in Mae West-y sort of way and mean, "Naw I don't regret a thing" or it can resonate with power and emotion as it did when Edith Piaf recorded the song written by Charles Dumont in 1960.

Piaf's voice set Dumon't words ablaze. The French Foreign Legion adopted it as their anthem when their resistance was broken during the Algerian War and it is still sung when they are on parade.

The song has been used in several movies, but by far the most famous use to date has to be as the "alarm clock" in Inception. The Hans Zimmer score is actually "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" using different times.

"All the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Édith Piaf track. So I could slip into half-time; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time." (Zimmer)

Throw in that Marion Cotillard played Edith Piaf in La môme (in this usage it means the waif rather than the sparrow) and Inception starts to make a little more sense. Especially since Cotillard's character's name is "Mal" which means bad in French...

But I didn't know much about the facts behind the song - even what I typed above before - until this very afternoon. I knew Piaf sang the song and that's about all I needed to know. It's one of the few songs that I never turned my nose up as a child when my grandmother would play it. It wasn't old people's music to me, not even then. I didn't get the deeper meaning or the now obvious pain mixed with courage and wisdom. That came later. And in bits and pieces.

When I left France for the US at the tender age of 10 armed with dreams and Madonna cassettes for the long flight to Boston from Paris and got a little homesick, I played a tape of Edith Piaf I recorded by holding up my cassette player close to the speaker of my grandparents record player. I wanted to listen to "La Vie En Rose", which always made me think the time my grandmother burned the madelines and she was so mad about it she shouted a string of expletives that it would be indecent to subject you to by typing here. My grandmother didn't swear and so of course I found it hilarious. My grandfather, who used such words with a great amount of skill and finesse in his "peppered" conversations thought it was as hilarious as I did. Eventually my grandmother had to laugh too because she rarely ever even said the word putain (which has soooo many meanings but fuck is one of them and we French use it more often than we'd probably admit).

I sat in my room far away from the people I loved and no matter how grey it was "La Vie En Rose" made life beautiful and pink again. When the song was over and "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" would start to play I would listen to it and then I'd press stop and rewind the tape to the beginning.

Fast foward and I was 20 and I was in love and my boyfriend at the time, let's call him Le Premier and I had just broken up for the last time. The boy who took me around New York City and kissed me in front of the sign for the Rocky Horror Picture Show playing on Broadway and I were non plus - no more. I needed to get my mojo back.

That when I met Il Secondo. He was from the north of Italy and wore these perfectly tailored shirts that barely seemed to contain his sexiness. Together we drank bottles of wine and created pasta confections he said he would never be able to cook for anyone who was actually Italian. The wine was all Italian of course. But then one day I insisted we buy a bottle of good Bordeaux and this beautiful man who I built robots with during the day made me what he called "French pasta" (it was bacon and butter with parsley) at 2 in the morning using the electric plate in my lab and we ate and listened to Edith Piaf and laughed about his conceptions of the French and France (women sexy, men wimpy, wine not so good, food barely edible).

When "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" came on I asked him what he regretted and he said nothing. I pressed him further. Nope, still nothing, he insisted. I found it hard to believe. I regretted everything it seemed. When he asked me what I regretted I changed the topic. "Just that you won't admit Italy is inferior to France" I think I said.

Long after Il Secondo went to work at some think tank for geniuses taking his sexiness and shirts with him, I was just moving to New York. I moved into an apartment building with a few French neighbours and we made fast friends over trying to make perfect baguettes and find good wine for cheap. My neighbour Sophie was a really talented seamstress who was trying to start her own business and she loved the song. She played it on Sundays while we'd pin up whatever dress she was making or while she'd do me the favour of hemming my pants before I had to rush off to work in the morning. When I asked her what her favourite song was once during a late night wine fueled chat, her answer didn't surprise me. Sophie seemed like she regretted a lot sometimes. "It gives me hope," Sophie told me. And from that day I listened to it too whenever I needed some hope.

Two years later when my grandmother passed away from cancer I went with my iPod and listened to this song the first time I went to put flowers on her grave. I still had regrets, but I knew my grandmother didn't. She spent most of her life with a man who had loved her and understood how to make her happy and who brought out the very best in her during their lifetime together. She had an exciting life. She was an amazing woman. I played it for her, my grandmother because I not only loved her with all my heart, but because there was so much about her I hope to be one day. It became in my mind her anthem. It was what I was going to aspire to.

But today it's mine. I'm wiser now. It'll been six years since I came back to France in August and lost my grandmother. Becoming French again, as I vowed to do was not only hard it proved impossible. So I stopped giving a shit what mean French people said about un-Frenchness. I was un-French and proud. The timidness that kept me from living my new life to the fullest was gone.

My accent that once often called bizarre is now sometimes charmant (charming). My little faults are more easily dismissed as part of this charm by those who find my un-Frenchness refreshing. My slightly peculiar way of speaking French is seen by those who see some kindred streak in me as evidence of my (and by association their) cleverness.

When I listen to "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" these days I have to sing along. It's my anthem now. Maybe not the only anthem ("It's My Life", Talk Talk is another), but it means something to the me that has less regrets now and is still hopeful that one day instead of this beautiful song being my battle cry as I charge at the future it will instead be my eventual victory song.

This is for us Mémé.