Dispatches: Thirty Years Dead, the Sparrow Lives

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...