Forever Angelique

ANGeLIQUE (890 pp.) --Sergeanne Golon--Llpplncoff ($5.95).

Once upon a time, in the dank and gloomy castle of Monteloup in old Poitou, there lived an impecunious baron and his daughter Angelique, a wild and barefoot sprite who played, perhaps more than she should, with the peasant boy Nicholas. Looking to Angelique's beauty to save him from ruin, the baron betrothed her to the Comte de Peyrac de Morens, known as the Great Lame Devil of Languedoc, who was said to be so ugly that girls ran away when he passed by on his great black horse. As it turned out. Angelique and the lame count hit it off famously, but the count dabbled in alchemy and was burned at the stake, leaving Angelique to disappear, nameless and forgotten, into the reeking underworld of 17th century Paris.

There she lived with beggars, cutthroats, cutpurses, dwarfs and cripples, including the leering, one-eyed gangleader Calembredaine, who had a "nightmare face, blurred by long strands of greasy hair [and] marked by a violet wen.'' It was Calembredaine who in a frightful brawl won Angelique as his mistress and carried her unconscious to his lair. When Calembredaine tore off wig and wen, who should he be but Nicholas, the ever-loving peasant friend from old Poitou!

Angelique, already a U.S. bestseller, is an enormous fairy tale for adult children, of whom there are legions. The French eagerly took to Angelique as a serial in France-Soir. It ran for more than a year, time enough to catch a breath between one night's adventure and the next. The reader of the 890-page U.S. translation must pace himself, and should be warned that the author is one up on him from the beginning. Novelist "Sergeanne" Colon is not one person but two--an apparently indefatigable French man-and-wife team (Serge and Anne) who claim to have primed themselves with 300 volumes of history before painting their cyclorama. Their scholarship is not intrusive.

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