French Leaves

THE SECRETS OF CAROLINE CniRiE (309 pp.)--Cecil Saint-Laurent--Crown ($3.50).

It is 1812, and Napoleon is advancing upon Moscow. Mere versts away, within the Russian lines, French Agent Caroline de Salanches is retreating equally rapidly from Prince Michael Dubrovin. During an orgy at his estate, Prince Michael has exposed Agent Caroline. In fact, he has left her without a stitch of covering above the waist. The air is filled with shrieks, screams and wolfish roars as the Russian nobility, ever lovers of traditional customs, pursue nude serfs round and round the banquet hall. But Caroline is resolved at least to keep her head. As Prince Michael bears down upon her, his "greedy and sarcastic gaze" inflamed with "voluptuous contempt," Caroline puts a torch to the hangings. Gusts of fire sweep the room. Amid shouts, pistol shots and clouds of alcoholic smoke, Caroline legs it from the lodge, with Michael in hot pursuit, "howling like a wolf." Too late! Caroline has won again.

Caroline Cherie, as she is known to countless thousands of Frenchmen, always wins--not least when she chooses to surrender. She is like the heroine of an old movie serial, with the important difference that where the movie heroine was chained fully clothed to the tracks to be torn asunder by the Santa Fe express, Caroline is generally denuded by pursuers intent on joining her in union specific. As she herself sportingly admits at a critical moment (she is hanging almost naked from a rafter in a subzero temperature): "There is something better to do with . . . women than to kill them."

Since World War II the French have agreed so warmly with this attitude that Caroline has become French fiction's most popular heroine. The novels in which she appears (The Secrets is the third to be published in the U.S.) have had sales of more than a million.

The reason is that though the Caroline novels are blatantly aphrodisiacal in intent, they are more than mere buff in content. Author Cecil Saint-Laurent is a serious historian as well as an able hack.

At 37, he has published more than 80 books under 20 names, including a sober study entitled When France Occupied Europe (1792-1815). Consequently, when he makes Caroline an eyewitness to Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, he knows what that eyeful was. Every page of Secrets is dotted with the stock characters of romantic fiction--dashing lieutenants, gallant generals, evil-faced spies and slimy turncoats--but Saint-Laurent trots them out with verve, gives them real jobs to do. The most dignified historian might respect Saint-Laurent's dramatic, spine-freezing account of Boney's awful homeward trudge, which would teach most schoolboys a lot more than they would get from most textbooks. Unfortunately, the frequent appearances of Caroline, strangling her ravishers with whips and pointing loaded pistols at them from her naked hip, make this novel unsuitable for school study.

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