Warrior's Rest

For all his preoccupation with building the New France, le grand Charles is also his country's grandliseur, whose voracious reading takes up at least two hours of each day. On rising, De Gaulle skims through the morning press, after lunch he peruses Le Monde, then he snatches a few chapters from a book. Evenings, De Gaulle relaxes in a bedroom chair with more books.

Inundated by gift copies, De Gaulle leafs through every volume sent him, reads with care those that seem promising. Afterward he writes personal notes in longhand to the author, length and warmth depending on his opinion of the work (one of his highest compliments: "I congratulate myself for having read your book"). In recent months De Gaulle has polished off, among others, Francois d'Harcourt's L'Asie, Reveil d'un Monde, dealing with the diversity of Asian cultures; Edouard Sablier's De I'Oural a I'Atlantique, a dissertation on Communist penetration; L'Histoire Secrete, a history of France from 1936 through the Algerian war; and L'agran-dissement, an abstract novel by Claude Mauriac.

For light reading, De Gaulle occasionally shows a penchant for the torrid. The pro-Gaullist weekly Le Nouveau Candide raised Parisian eyebrows some time ago by reporting that De Gaulle had read Les Pianos Mecaniques by Henri-Francois Rey. A French bestseller highly praised by the critics, Pianos is a sort of Dolce Vita set on Spain's Costa Brava whose main characters-a schizophrenic journalist, a neglected teen-age boy and girl, a half-wit charwoman-move through their pointless lives battling boredom with promiscuity. Sample passage: "She led him to the bed, still keeping their lips locked. Vincent lay down. Jenny detached herself. She began to undress him, with sure clean motions . . ."

It is just possible that the President did not know what he was getting into when he started the book. Once during a lunch with friends, he asked one of the wives present: "What have you been reading?" Answer: Le Repos du Guer-rier (The Warrior's Rest). Apparently thinking it a military tome, the President said eagerly: "Ah, tres bien. Could you lend it to me?" Actually, the book, whose movie version starred Brigitte Bardot, was a sultry item dealing more with conquests in the bedroom than on the battlefield.

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