Love of Seven Dolls by Paul Gallico Read Free Book Online Page A

meeting this morning and voted you a share. Dr Duclos presided. His speech from the chair lasted forty-seven minutes . . .”
    A crowd began to collect at the sight of a young girl in earnest conversation with a doll—the day’s work began . . .
    All that summer and into the fall they trouped through Eastern France and Alsace, slowly working southwards, moving from town to town, sometimes part of a street fair, carnival or kermess, at others setting up the booth in the market place or square of small villages en route in the country without so much as a by-your-leave from the police or local authorities.
    When these officials came demanding permits they found themselves disconcertingly having to deal with Carrot Top, Mr. Reynardo, Madame Muscat, or Dr. Duclos with Mouche endeavouring to help with the explanations, and usually their charm won the day and they were allowed to remain.
    Since, by virtue of Mouche’s advent, the lean days were over, there was always a bed in an inn, cheap hotel, or farmhouse with a room to spare and sometimes the luxury even of a bath at night after a day spent in the hot sun. Only now Capitaine Coq no longer bothered to engage two rooms but simply shared one and the bed in it with Mouche.
    Thus Mouche, without realising it, was possessed by him both by day and by night.
    The days continued to be an enduring enchantment, the nights an everlasting torment, whether he used her for his pleasure, or turned his back upon her without a word and fell into heavy sleep, leaving her lying there trembling. Sometimes he came to the room in a stupor, barely able to stand after hours of drinking in the tap room. When this happened, Mouche looked after him, undressed him, got him into bed and when he cursed or moaned and tossed during the night she got up to give him water to drink or place a wet cloth upon his head.
    Capitaine Coq was drinking to excess because he had impaled himself upon the horns of a strange and insoluble dilemma, and he did not know what to do, except consume wine until all sensation and memory was gone.
    On the one hand he was taking all that he wanted or needed from Mouche. She was a growing asset to the show and he was beginning to make money. Further, she was a captive bedmate for whom he need feel no responsibility. But on the other he had made the discovery that while he had indeed been able to ravage her physically, he had never succeeded in destroying her innocence.
    He hungered to annihilate it even though at the same time he knew that this was the very quality that drew the audiences and communicated itself to them. Wishing her as soiled and hardened as he was, he debauched her at night and then willy-nilly restored her in the daytime through the medium of the love of the seven dolls, so that phoenix-like she arose each day from the ashes of abuse of the night before, whether it was a tongue lashing, or a beating, or to be used like a woman of the streets. She was rendered each time as soft, and dewy eyed, as innocent and trusting as she had been the night he had first encountered her on the outskirts of Paris.
    The more cruelly he treated her, the kindlier and more friendly to her were the puppets the next morning. He seemed to have lost all control over them.
    As for Mouche, she lived in a turmoil of alternating despair and entrancing joy.
    One night, in Besançon, in a horrible, culminating attempt to break her, Coq appeared in their room with a slut he had picked up in the tavern. They were both drunk.
    He switched on the light and stood there looking down at her while she roused herself and sat up. “Get up and get out,” he commanded.
    She did not understand and sat there staring.
    “Get out. I’m sick of you.”
    She still could not understand what he meant. “But Michel . . . Where am I to go?”
    “To the devil, for all I care. Hurry up and get out. We want that bed . . .”
    That night Mouche reached a new depth of shame and humiliation as she dressed beneath the