Napoleonic Tour

MIRAGE (726 pp.)--Ruth McKenney --Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.95).

This huge historical novel gives the impression of having been written by two different authors--one whose job it was to put plenty of sex on every other page; the other a Francophile intent on cramming in as much esoteric knowledge as possible about Napoleon, Egypt, archaeology, physics, intrigue and strategy. Fortunately, both writers are combined in Humorist Ruth (My Sister Eileen) McKenney, so that sex is more often ridiculous than salacious, and the historical asides often get a witty assist over the dusty pit of pedantry.

During the French Revolution, Remi Saint-Victor and the Marquise Corinne de Theuriet narrowly missed appointments with the guillotine. Now, after four years' imprisonment, Remi is back at the Polytechnic Institute where he had been Lavoisier's prize pupil; the marquise is the wife of complaisant General Rouvroy and the mistress of scoundrelly Jardinier, a British spy, black-marketeer and confidant of the great. On the night of Talleyrand's great ball for Napoleon and Josephine, the eyes of Remi and Corinne meet across a crowded room: "He saw her catch her breath. The chocolate dropped from her fingers. Her hand went to the base of her lovely white throat; her brilliant eyes burned, a promise to Remi, a beckoning. He bowed, smiling." Within ten pages they are busily engaged in rumpling the sofa of Remi's bachelor flat while Jardinier is bound for Amsterdam in his carriage with only a Russian Grand Duchess to tousle.

These boudoir conquests are succeeded by Napoleon's conquest of Egypt. (Remi is one of a corps of French savants whom Napoleon takes along to bring civilization to the benighted Arabs.) Author McKenney handles battles with as much relish as bundling. The rout of the Mamelukes at the Pyramids is closely followed by the annihilation of the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, and Napoleon and his army of 25,000 settle down for their strange three-year sojourn in Egypt. The impact of the French Age of Enlightenment on the 12th century mentality of the fellahin gives Author McKenney some of her best pages.

Remi takes an Egyptian child bride as a favor to Napoleon, who dreams of founding a new dynasty and a new race in the Middle East. But the French are halted at Acre, plague decimates their ranks, the fellahin reject Enlightenment for the savage joys of Holy War against the Christian dogs. Napoleon is defeated by fate, and Remi by Corinne. Author McKenney, who has spent nearly four years in writing Mirage, tells her complicated story in an elliptic, literary shorthand that conveys much information quickly but will be the despair of some readers. Nearly every page is scattered with the confetti of French, Latin and Italian phrases, and, occasionally, the dialogue is so polished as to remain forever obscure. Still, the world she describes, if not the authentic 18th century, is nevertheless an authentic world of the imagination. Her Paris is as gay as a dream of Paris, her Egypt as eerily strange as all lands that lie below the horizon of time, and her people have a fevered life of their own--more life, in fact, than they are likely to have in the three-hour movie that will certainly be made from Mirage.

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