Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 88: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

~~ 1 A E. “4 ; -_ a ‘ad wy - M 7. 1 PO PARA ¥ ’ . \ a 7 ew, . h 4g Lae ' . ‘ or ; DY Ay Ne 86 PAUL GALLICO but you won’t do. Ifa 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 Mouche was sixteen. She had then gone to Saint 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 were 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 was never 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 showed only too clearly 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 de Neuilly in the morn- ing 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. 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 comicloooks.comn