Love of Seven Dolls

LOVE OF SEVEN DOLLS

A young girl called Mouche is about to throw herself into the Seine, when her attention is attracted by a voice. It turns out to be the voice of a glove puppet, called Carrot Top. She then meets Reynardo the fox, Gigi, Alifanfaron, Dr. Duclos, Madame Muscat and Monsieur Nicholas. The story is about her relationship with the seven puppets and their grim puppetmaster, Capitaine Coq, and what happens when she joins their travelling show.

This is another of Paul Gallico’s brilliant short novels. You find yourself thinking, as Mouche does, of the puppets as individuals, and completely forgetting that they are only puppets.

Books by Paul Gallico

THE SNOW GOOSE
THE LONELY
JENNIE
TRIAL BY TERROR
THE SMALL MIRACLE
SNOWFLAKE
THE FOOLISH IMMORTALS
LOVE OF SEVEN DOLLS
LUDMILA
THOMASINA
THE STEADFAST MAN
A Life of St. Patrick

MRS ’ARRIS GOES TO PARIS
THE HURRICANE STORY
MRS ’ARRIS GOES TO NEW YORK
TOO MANY GHOSTS
CONFESSIONS OF A STORY-TELLER
SCRUFFY

First published in Great Britain by

MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD
52 Bedford Square
London, W.C.
1
SEPTEMBER 1954

© 1954 by Paul Gallico

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner.

ISBN: 0-7181-0223-1

To

BURR TILLSTROM

and

FRAN ALLISON

L O V E

O F

S E V E N

D O L L S

I
N
P
ARIS, IN THE SPRING OF OUR TIMES
, a young girl was about to throw herself into the Seine.

She was a thin, awkward creature with a wide mouth and short black hair. Her body was all bones and hollows where there should have been curves and flesh. Her face was appealing, but it was now gaunt with hunger and the misery of failure. Her eyes were haunting, large, liquid, dark and filled with despair.

Her name was Marelle Guizec, but her nickname was Mouche. She was an orphan, a Bretonnaise from the village of Plouharg, near St. Brieuc. Wretched though she was, some of the mystery of this mysterious land still clung to her. It manifested itself in the grace with which she walked as though still clad in the swinging peasant skirts, the gravity of her glance, her innocence and primitive mind in which for all her youth—she was only twenty-two—were dark corners of Celtic brooding. One of these was now leading her to her death.

She wished to die, for like many young girls from the provinces she had come to Paris to try to succeed in the theatre. She had failed most miserably. There was truly no single soul in the world who cared what became of her now that she had been dismissed from the lowly
Moulin Bleu Revue
as incompetent and incapable of inspiring interest or desire amongst the patrons. There was no one who was her friend. The paltry francs she would receive would feed and shelter her for only a few days. After that she must starve or sell herself.

Do you remember Paris that May when spring came early and the giant candelabra of the chestnut trees in bloom illuminated the beautiful city?

The sun-washed days were warm, but the nights still cold and often windy. By day Paris played at summer; the children appeared with their nurses by the Rond Point, the scent of perfumed women lingered on the boulevards, the gay shops glittered in the sunlight; the sky was a canopy of that particular blue that seems to exist only over France. But in the evening, the chill drove people off the streets.

It was for this reason that the early season street carnival beyond the Pont Neuilly was preparing to pack up and depart in disappointment, for it had expected to do most of its business after dark.

Its chain of nakedly glaring electric-light bulbs and smoking gasolene flares stretched along one side of the Avenue General de Gaulle from the Rond Point de la Defence all the way to the bridge across the Seine that gave entrance to Paris from the west.

The clangour of the street fair, the carrousel music, the cries of the barkers and snapping of rifles in the shooting galleries, the ringing of bells and snorting of the engines that operated the rides had given way to the more prosaic sounds of dismantling, hammering and sawing, and the noise of boards and metal sheets being thrown to the ground and flats being loaded on trucks was drowning out the last of the mechanical music-makers.

Only a few hardy stragglers defied the chill breeze and hung about as swings, whip rides, auto dodgems, stages and tents began to come down. By morning, nothing but the litter in the street and the worn patches on the earth at the side of the broad avenue would indicate where the fair had been.

In the draughty, outdoor canvas-enclosed square that served the shivering girls of the tawdry
Moulin Bleu Revue
as a dressing-room Mouche, having surrendered the scanty bits of costume that had been lent her, donned her clothes and reflected for the last time upon the collapse of her hopes.

The cheap grind and strip show was packing to move on to St. Germaine, but she had not been good enough even to keep this job and go along. At the conclusion of the final performance that night the manager had discharged her, saying, “Too thin, too thin, my child. Our girls run more to meat and juice. I heard someone in the audience say of you, ‘Here comes that little plucked chicken again.’ Sorry, but you won’t do. If a girl cannot sing or dance, at least she must look like something.”

It was true. Mouche excited pity rather than desire.

Her story was the usual one of the stage-struck girl encouraged by perhaps a local success at some amateur theatricals. Orphaned during the war, she had lived with a great-aunt, who had likewise died when she was but sixteen. She had then gone to St. Brieuc and secured a job cleaning the town hall, saving her money until she had sufficient to make the journey to Paris.

And there she had come face to face with the fact that she had neither the talent nor the physical equipment to further her ambitions.

She had been pawed by dirty men and stripped by agents and managers, who had examined the merchandise of her body and in the end had laughed and turned her out undamaged, for her innocence and chastity was an affront to their consciences and they wished to have her out of their sight.

Occasionally she had succeeded in securing a trial in the cabarets of Pigalle and Montmartre and this had kept her from starvation, but she never was able to hold a job, and, descending always lower, had ended with the strip revue in the street fair and now had been judged unfit for this most miserable of forms of entertainment. Not even to the tawdry audiences that filed through the tents for a few francs could her body deliver a single, solitary illusion.

It was this that determined her to do away with herself, for the dismissal pointed up the fact that even had she come to the point of selling herself to keep from starvation she would have found no buyers.

Mouche looked about her once more at the chattering girls who at least were useful in that they could walk across a plank stage and make men shout, or laugh and whistle. Then she collected her few belongings and packed them into the small straw valise she had brought with her, as she had expected to be travelling with them in the bus to their next stop.

She would have no further need for these articles, but she could not bring herself to abandon them. The straw suitcase would be found standing on the parapet of the Pont Neuilly in the morning when the police came with their long poles and fished her body out of the Seine.

She picked up the bag and without a backward glance went out of the enclosure. It seemed as if in anticipation of her rendezvous the light was already extinguished from her eyes. Her thin shoulders had the droop of the beaten girl so easily recognised in France, the soon-to-be suicide . . .

The manager emerged just then and recognising it, was, for a moment, moved to pity and tempted to reverse his decision and call her back. But he hesitated. If one had pity on every little scarecrow from the provinces, where would one end?

And yet there was something appealing about the little one. He had felt it. Not what the customers wanted, but still—if one could catch what it was . . . By the. time he had decided to yield to his better nature and called after her, “Allo! Mouche! Wait. Come back. Perhaps . . .” she was gone.

Mouche, marching unseeing, like one already dead, towards the Seine, thought briefly of her childhood in Brittany and saw again the blue-green seas crashing in white foam onto the black rocks, the sunny fields cut by crooked stone walls and the flames of the poppies from the midst of which rose the ancient stone crosses and still more ancient Druid menhirs.

The fisherboats beat their way home; children played in the sand; the postman on his bicycle rode by; women stopped for a gossip outside the baker’s cottage and for a moment Mouche smelled the fresh bread and crisp rolls. She was in church again and heard the rustle of starched head-dresses and the sigh of the organ. Snatches of melodies of old songs drifted through her mind and for an instant she saw her mother’s work-worn hands arranging her first Communion dress. Recollections came to her of old friends, a grey rabbit she had once owned and a tortoise, a yellow cat and a duck that had only one leg. She remembered the eyes of wild things that sometimes peered from the depth of hedges in not unfriendly fashion.

Looking into this bright garden of life as through a door opened in a wall, yet she could not see how much there was to live for, that she was young and that one could build anew upon the ashes of failure. The black, smoky night, so noisy, cold and hostile, encouraged only the sunless corners of her mind. She hurried forward as one who goes unseeing.

Something, or someone cried out of the darkness: “Hello there, you with the suitcase! Where are you going and what’s your hurry?”