Mostly About Sex

THE GREEN MARE (234 pp.)--Marcel Ayme--Harper ($3).

THE WICKED VILLAGE (304 pp.)--Gabriel Chevallier--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

A Kinsey litmus would probably show that the average Frenchman is no naughtier than most people, but French novelists have made his little delinquencies into one of the most readable of literary exports. To be sure, there are the existentialist writers who manage to turn sex into a measure of personal calamity and there are the Mauriacs who turn it into a measure of sin. But for the moment, U.S. read ers can settle back in relief with two new French novels that restore the classic Gallic atmosphere to the oldest game in the world. In both The Green Mare of Marcel Ayme and The Wicked Village of Gabriel Chevallier a fun-and-games attitude toward sex sets the tone, so that even the most serious consequences of immoderate passion are summed up with nothing more stern than a sympathetic shrug.

It is almost 20 years since Author Chevallier tickled a lot of readers with The Scandals of Clochemerle, a French village in the Beaujolais country, where every bit of thick underbrush had a tale to tell. Clochemerle is The Wicked Village, but no one is expected to take the title seriously. To be sure, everyone drinks too much wine, but after all, they grow the stuff and depend on it for a livelihood. In the spring the boys and girls are apt to experiment a little too ardently or carelessly, so that a rather high proportion of firstborns are illegitimate. But marriage. more often than not sets things to rights.

Cure Ponosse understood all this, and it never occurred to him that the door of heaven should be slammed in the faces of such innocent wrongdoers. When he died, beloved even by the anticlericals, the cure was succeeded by a young ascetic who tried the fire-and-brimstone approach. He did not last long. Letters to the archbishop signed by worthy Clochemerlins made it plain that if they had to choose between the church and their frailties, the church would go empty. The archbishop saw the point at once, and sent them a new cure who could put away wine with the best of them. It is true that when Tistin, the town's unemployed handy man, got two widows with child, things seemed, even for Clochemerle, to have reached a sorry pass. But the village women were willing to concede that a widow's life was not much fun, and that once the children were baptized they would be as good Christians as any. As for Tistin--well, a chap like that, with so much time on his hands.

Under the Bed. Author Chevallier is obviously out for a fictional romp, and even people who deplore his easy tolerance can enjoy his plotless prattle. Marcel Ayme, as able a writer as any in France, is no more inclined to scold sinners, but his tightly plotted yarn is a more sardonic, more pointed comment on the human comedy. The Green Mare has some of the quality of a fable, as well as some of the inescapable judgment of life that every good fable offers. In the farm town of Claquebue most human feelings and actions are taken coolly for granted. Also taken for granted is the family feud between the Malorets and the Haudouins.

The unpleasant fact is that during the Franco-Prussian War Honore Haudouin was forced to lie quietly under his mother's bed while a Prussian sergeant had his way with her. Convinced that Zephe Maloret sent the Prussians there, he has hated the family ever since. His well-to-do brother Ferdinand wants to drop the feud because Maloret is important politically. Ferdinand is the kind of man who, on hearing that his favorite son wants to enter the priesthood, says flatly: "You'll get no dessert until you have changed your mind." Hearing the shocking story of their mother's shame for the first time, he writes to Honore: "The whole thing remains revolting, of course, but after all, she only yielded to one man, and he was a sergeant. In fact, we cannot even be sure that he was not an officer. And then, our mother was no longer young, and there are affronts which a woman past the age of 50 feels less acutely than one in the flower of her youth."

Into the Closet. For a while the feud between the brothers threatens to over shadow the war between the families.

Things become even more difficult when the classic Romeo-and-Juliet aspect of feuds crops up in the love affair of Honore's daughter and Maloret's son. The complications, always hilarious and elaborated with much Aymean gusto, come thick and fast. But Honore, the soul of goodness and absolutely free of guile, cannot live down the need for revenge. In the last Rabelaisian scene he stuffs

Maloret into a closet, knocks out his son and pushes him under the bed, and takes Madame Maloret. Gallic irony: the lady is delighted.

As in his other excellent novels, Ayme's sharply observed background is a backdrop against which quite ordinary people play out parts they never asked for. Things happen, they get involved, and voila! A cool customer. Author Ayme himself never gets involved. He looks on with malice, with wit, and with a nice sense of just how much his characters can do about things and to what extent they are helpless victims. All this and a style that is as supple as it is lucid makes him one of the best satirists now writing.

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