Love of Seven Dolls Read Online Free PDF Page A

father. When he was six his mother, who earned her living on the street, was murdered. Michel was taken by a carnival family. His foster-mother, a worn-out soubrette, augmented her income by obliging clients behind the tent after the performance; his foster father was a fire-eater in the freak show and was rarely sober.
    When Michel was twelve, the fire-eater engaged in a duel with a rival from another fair, but being drunk, miscalculated the amount of petrol he could store in his cheeks to blow out from his mouth in flames. Swallowing some which became ignited simultaneously he died horribly of internal combustion. His wife, already undermined with disease, did not survive him long, and at thirteen Michel was again alone in the world.
    By the time he was fifteen, he was a little savage practised in all of the cruel arts and swindles of the street fairs and cheap carnivals. Now at thirty-five he was handsome in a rakish way, with wiry, reddish hair, wide-spaced grey eyes in a pale face and a virile crooked nose wrinkled still further by a blow that had flattened it during a brief experiment with pugilism and which, with a sensuous mouth, gave him something of the look of a satyr.
    Throughout his life no one had ever been kind to him, or gentle, and he paid back the world in like. Wholly cynical, he had no regard or respect for man, woman, child or God. Not at any time he could remember in this thirty-five years of existence had he ever loved anything or anyone. He looked upon women as conveniences that his appetite demanded, and after he had used them, abandoned them or treated them badly. Why he had picked up the thin, wretched bit of flotsam known as Mouche he could not have told. Indeed, he would have insisted that it was not he at all who had added her to his queer family, but the members of that group themselves, Carrot Top, Monsieur Reynardo, Mme. Muscat and Monsieur Nicholas, who had made the decision.
    For in spite of the fact that it was he who sat behind the one-way curtain in the booth, animated them and supplied their seven voices, the puppets frequently acted strangely and determinedly as individuals over whom he had no control. Michel never had bothered to reflect greatly over this phenomenon but had simply accepted it as something that was so and which, far from interfering with the kind of life he was accustomed to living, brought him a curious kind of satisfaction.
    Growing up with the people of the carnival acts, Michel had learned juggling, sword-swallowing and leaping on the trampolin, but it was in ventriloquism that he became the most proficient.
    The lives of the puppets had begun when Michel Peyrot was a prisoner of the Germans during the war, and in their camps had a kind of post-graduate course in all that was base in the human nature.
    In this evil period of an evil life he first carved and clad the seven puppets, brought them to life for the entertainment of his fellow prisoners and made the discovery that more and more they refused to speak the obscenities and vulgarities that make soldiers laugh, but instead were becoming individuals with lives of their own.
    During those times that he sat hidden in the puppet booth, Michel Peyrot was not, but the seven were. Golo, the derelict Senegalese, understood this paradox perfectly. To him it was simply the primitive jungle magic by which his spirit was enabled to leave the body and enter into other objects which then became imbued with his life. But there was yet another manifestation of which Michel Peyrot was unaware, and that was that under the scheme of creation it was not possible for a man to be wholly wicked and live a life entirely devoted to evil.
    If Carrot Top, Gigi and Ali the giant were restoring to him the childhood of which he had been robbed, or Reynardo, Dr. Duclos, Mme. Muscat and Monsieur Nicholas the means by which he could escape from himself, Michel was not consciously aware of it. Often he was cynically amused at the things done and