She-Wolves & Bicycles

SAVAGE PLAY (381 pp.)--Paul Colin--Dutton ($3.95).

It was evening in Paris. Young Franc,ois Gane and his friend Baumier were strolling along quietly when they saw the provocative form of a strange young lady walking ahead of them. "A little before they came abreast of her, Baumier with an ample movement of his arm, as if to catch a low volley ball, slapped her buttocks resoundingly." As he did so he roared: "Goddamn little chicken."

A little later--such is the long, slapping arm of coincidence in this novel--the chicken turns out to be Claude, a long-lost childhood sweetheart. Francois first knew Claude Herber and her brother Jean Jacques when they were children and lived in the country together, roaming the woods like a junior fan club for the Marquis de Sade. They played flogging games with horsewhips. Lashing Claude and another playmate, Denise, had been the best fun of all--"so sweet." Claude murmured, fondling her wound, "that afterwards one would like to be whipped again."

World War II interrupts these amusements, and Claude goes unwhipped for years. After the war Franc,ois tries to find his childhood friends again. Denise has grown into a woman as stunning and desirable as "my beautiful bicycle when I was eight years old ... all nickel and ultramarine enamel." Francois marries her, but he cannot forget Claude. She has almost ruined herself by spending too much time in the primrose (or aquamarine) bed of dalliance with a bunch of softies. But soon after the slapping incident, Franc,ois is seen pursuing her through a forest on horseback, whipping her until she is at last dragged through a heap of "fine liquid mud" and forced to surrender, "howling her rattle of a she-wolf."

Savage Play has only a few other things to offer besides literary mud. There are some sharply evocative sketches of French aristocrats in the old-fashioned countryside, and of French Protestants in a prim, latter-day Huguenot Parisian flat. And there is the strange children's world in which cruelty is mixed with utter innocence. The novel won the 1950 Prix Goncourt and sold 100,000 copies in France. But then, French tastes have always been rather special.

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