The Free French

THE BLESSING (305 pp.]--Nancy Mitford--Random House ($3).

Nancy Mitford's favorite characters have the candor and abruptness of people well into their third or fourth glass of champagne. The hero of The Blessing, Airman Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, of the Free French, is clearly one of Novelist Mitford's favorites. He is, in fact, a woman's dream come true: handsome, rich, brave as a lion, bewitching as a magician. It is thus a serious tactical error when the unimaginative Hughie Palgrave invites Charles-Edouard to look up his fiancee, Grace, in London.

"So I looked up," Charles-Edouard cheerily explains to Grace soon after, adding: "So perhaps on Wednesday?"

"Wednesday what?" asks Grace.

"The marriage?" says Charles-Edouard. "I will now go and call on your father."

"Hughie ought to have married her before he went away," says Grace's father crossly. "He leaves a position utterly undefended. He can't be surprised if it falls into--well, Allied hands."

Seven Long Years. Little Sigismond is born a year later. "Such a funny sort of name," protests his English nanny. "I don't care to say it in the street, makes people look round."

"I think he's a blessing," says Grace.

She has the blessing all to herself for seven years, for the gallant Charles-Edouard goes off to the wars, and it is a good year or so after V-E day before he turns up in Britain again. Then he sweeps Grace, little Sigi and Nanny off to a new life in France.

Grace is impressed and reassured when she meets his dowdy, aristocratic aunts. They beg her to sit down and tell them all about recent English literature. The shock comes when Charles-Edouard ushers Grace into Paris society. Titled beauties, their faces "gaily painted with no attempt at simulating nature," flow through the salons in a kaleidoscope of crinolines, jewels, naked shoulders and almost naked bosoms, leaving warm waves of scent behind them.

"Are you still in love with Albertine?" a deaf old crone roars to Charles-Edouard.

He seizes her ebony ear trumpet and bellows back, "No! I'm married now and I have a child of seven."

"So I heard. But what has that to do with it?"

A Good Meringue. Everyone adores little Sigi. When he asks to take a toy to bed, there are trills of laughter. "But this child is his father over again," gurgles lovely Albertine. "The moment he sees something pretty he wants to take it to bed with him."

"A little life of your own," Charles-Edouard's grandmother advises Grace, "will never be held against you [in France], so long as you always put your husband first." But Grace pines and rages, and at last takes the boat for England. "Are you divorced?" asks Sigi hopefully. "Georgie ... says it's an awfully good idea ... His Mummy and Daddy have both married again, so he's got two of each now, and he says the new ones are ... really better."

It takes Author Mitford a lot of maneuvering to outwit Sigi's determination to have at least as many fathers as Georgie. If, in the last few rounds, the Mitford inventive power shows signs of weariness, this is no doubt due to her having fought the early ones with so much carefree audacity. The Blessing is her seventh, and best, novel (runners-up: Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate), and its overall gaiety more than makes up for the fact that its British nannies, French lovers, ECA Americans, etc. are not so much fresh creations as types lifted easily from well-known hooks.

In an age when very few good novelists even try to be debonair, Nancy Mitford brings it off. The Blessing has as much weightiness and social significance as a good meringue.

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