Read Online Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York by Paul Gallico - Free Book Online Page A

expedition of catching a glimpse of his goddess, the star model, with whom he was desperately and, of course, quite hopelessly in love.
    For Mlle Natasha, as she was known to press and public in the fashion world, was the toast of Paris, a dark-haired,dark-eyed beauty of extraordinary attraction and one who surely had a brilliant career before her either in films or a rich and titled marriage. Every important bachelor in Paris, not to mention a considerable quota of married men, were paying her court.
    M. Fauvel came from a good middle class family; his was a good position with a good wage, and he had a little money besides, but his world was as far removed from the brilliant star of Natasha as was the planet earth from the great Sirius.
    He was fortunate, for that moment he did catch a sight of her in the doorway of the dressing room, already encased in the first number she was to model, a frock of flame-coloured wool, and on her glossy head perched a flame-coloured hat. A diamond snowflake sparkled at her throat, and a sable stole was draped carelessly over one arm. M. Fauvel thought that his heart would stop and never beat again, so beautiful was she and so unattainable.
    Glancing out of her sweet, grave eyes set wide apart in narrowing lids, Mlle Natasha saw M. Fauvel and yet saw him not, as, showing a sliver of pink tongue, she stifled a yawn. For truth to tell, she was prodigiously bored. None but a few at Dior’s knew the real identity much less the real personality of the long-limbed, high-waisted, raven-haired Niobe who attracted the rich and famous to her side like flies.
    Her real name then was Suzanne Petitpierre. Her origin was a simple bourgeois family in Lyons and she was desperately weary of the life her profession forced her to lead, the endless rounds of cocktail parties, dinners, theatres, and cabarets, as companion to film men, motor manufacturers, steel men, titled men, all of whom wished to be seen with the most glamorous and photographed model in the city. Mlle Petitpierre wanted nothing of any of them. She had no ambition for a career in films, or on the stage, or to takeher place as the châtelaine of some noble château. What she desired more than anything else was somehow to be able to rejoin that middle class from which she had temporarily escaped, marry someone for love, some good, simple man, who was not too handsome or clever, settle down in a comfortable bourgeois home, and produce a great many little bourgeois offspring. Such men existed, she knew, men who were not consistently vain, boastful, or super- intellectual to the point where she could not keep up with them. But they were somehow now all outside of her orbit. Even at that very moment when she was beneath the gaze of many admiring eyes she felt lost and unhappy. She remembered vaguely having seen the young man who was regarding her so intently, somewhere before, but could not place him.
    Finally, Mrs Harris, of Number 5 Willis Gardens, Battersea, London, came bustling up the staircase already crowded with recumbent figures, to be received by Mme Colbert. And then and there an astonishing thing took place.
    For to the regulars and
cognoscenti
the staircase at Christian Dior’s is Siberia, as humiliating a spot as when the head waiter of a fashionable restaurant seats you among the yahoos by the swinging doors leading to the kitchen. It was reserved strictly for boobs, nosies, unimportant people, and the minor press.
    Mme Colbert regarded Mrs Harris standing there in all her cheap clothing, and she looked right through them and saw only the gallant woman and sister beneath. She reflected upon the simplicity and the courage that had led her thither in pursuit of a dream, the wholly feminine yearning for an out-of-reach bit of finery, the touching desire, once in her drab cheerless life, to possess the ultimate in a creation. And she felt that somehow Mrs Harris was quite the most important and worthwhile person in the gatheringthere of