I sang the refrain in a very low voice. I think I was angry. Rene had read it before me. He must have known what I was thinking. It was weird, a kind of public, shameless declaration of love.

Lolita isn't too young for love, Isn't too young to surrender When desire devours her body, Right to the tips of her fingers.

We were silent for a long time. The message was clear. I was past the age of fairy tales, and at the age to jump into bed with the man I loved.

A few days after my nineteenth birthday, we launched the album Incognito in the most fashionable discotheque in Montreal, where I was getting my first real media exposure in more than a year and a half. New look, new sound, new team, new record company, new Celine Dion . . .

Je recommence та vie a zero ("I'm starting over at square one"), the song "Incognito" rightly said.

Very quickly, the rumors took on a new form. One day they'd say we were engaged. The next, that we'd gotten married in Las Vegas, after having lived in sin for months. They let everyone know, how­ever, that I wouldn't ever be pregnant because Rene had had a vasectomy; then, miracle of miracles, they announced that I was pregnant and that we were expecting twins.

Someday I hope I'll understand the gossip columnists who for more than ten years have insisted that I was going to have twins.

In Quebec, no one doubted that Rene Angelil and I were in love. Scads of people claimed to have seen us kissing on an airplane, in the streets of Paris, in a restaurant in Montreal.

Sometimes my greatest happiness has come when life imitated the

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rumors that were being spread. As if life wanted to make the gossip true or to fulfill our most cherished dreams.

The album Incognito attracted a wide spectrum of the public. As the people in marketing at CBS said, "We've never cut such a wide swath." The rock stations, who'd always stayed away from me, as well as the more genteel, family-oriented stations, who stayed faithful, shared the songs so completely that for months we had two, sometimes three hits topping the charts at the same time. At least in Quebec. Elsewhere things were going to move a lot more slowly.

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