French Foundling

THAT GIRL--Jacques Deval -- Viking ($2).*

On France, the motherland, Foundling Marie Basilide lavished the love that her parents never stayed to receive. Motherland France did not reciprocate this love; the native peasant boys took it personally. From the boys Marie occasionally accepted small gifts--"a knife, a printed handkerchief, a ruler, or a tobacco pouch, but never a penny unless it had a hole in it."

When, at 16, she becomes pregnant, she steals 100 francs from the local post office and runs away to Bordeaux. There she miscarries the child, takes to prostitution as a starving bird takes to a cage. The captain of a tramp steamer gets her drunk, whisks her off with him to Venezuela. There he drops her; there, bit by bit, she begins to collect money to get back to her adored France.

Reaching Panama, she settles in the Chorillo district, rents a hovel alongside some hundred others. She changes her name to Cherie, becomes all that the name implies. So many men of so many nationalities pass through her arms that she only thinks of them, like hurdling sheep, to keep insomnia away. The money in the hollow bed-leg rises coin by coin.

Everything goes well until Josiah, the old Negro who pimps for her, gets blood poisoning. Rather than send him to the free U. S. hospital, which the Negroes dread, Cherie gives up all her savings to have him treated privately. Josiah dies, and her hopes of seeing France wither. But there is still one hope in Tsamatsui. a Japanese merchant, whose last agent for Canal espionage has been shot. He offers her $200 for a few observations. Cherie makes them. Unfortunately a German agent, Staub, to whom she once gave her love for a few postcards of France and a gilded Eiffel Tower of lead, and who has since gone to the dogs because of a native marriage, finds her out and lets U. S. Commissioner Crawbett know. Cherie collects the money from Tsamatsui, buys everything necessary for her voyage home. On her last afternoon she strolls into the American Zone. The bullet that hits her is legalized by two bottles of liquor thrust into her stiffening hands. Home at last to France sails Cherie, tenderly laid by Tsamatsui in the coffin that he had kept polished and ready for himself.

*Published March 4.

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