Books: Gallic Galsworthy

THE PASQUIER CHRONICLES—Georges Duhamel—Holt ($3.50).

If a Frenchman had written The Forsyte Saga, that protracted story of family life might have been no shorter, but it is a safe bet that readers would have been well informed about the Forsytes’ sexual life. In The Pasquier Chronicles Georges Duhamel has done for his temperamental, crockery-smashing Pasquiers what Galsworthy did for his stiff-lipped Forsytes— told their tedious story with too many words—but he has enlivened it with Gallic interludes of scandals, passions and continental amours, any one of which would have been a major blot on the Forsyte escutcheon. Otherwise a puffy, ill-proportioned novel (848 pages), The Pasquier Chronicles reaches its modest distinction only when its central character, the tireless Papa Pasquier, gets involved in so many affairs that neither he nor the reader can keep them straight.

The first 290 pages, explaining the tangled circumstances of the family inheritance, are dull. The next 200 pages are better. The emotional, shrinking, 15-year-old Laurent Pasquier discovers that his father is keeping a woman, calls on her to ask that she give up the old man. When he is tricked by both the mistress and his father, Laurent denounces him, is dumfounded to learn that everybody knows about this affair and many others besides. The oldest boy, Joseph, escapes the family by turning himself into a money-making machine; the dull and stupid Ferdinand marries a girl as secretive as himself; Daughter Cécile becomes a concert pianist, admired by Debussy, loved by a composer whose music is so hopelessly bad he kills himself. In its last 358 pages The Pasquier Chronicles gets genuinely mysterious in its confused diffusion. A score of new characters pop into the story, including distinguished scientists who agonize about the universe. The action shifts from the embattled Pasquier household to a co-operative colony in which, to the accompaniment of shrill, ethereal disputes, young poets and artists run a printing press.

But if The Pasquier Chronicles contains incidents and implications that Galsworthy would not have touched with a ten-foot pole, it also contains ironic flashes equally foreign to the Englishman. Papa Pasquier, with his tempers, girls and moralizing lectures, studying to be a doctor in his middle age, buying automobiles that he cannot drive or pay for, lecturing strangers for their impoliteness in yawning in public, messing up the affairs of his whole family without an instant’s remorse, is a pompous, ridiculous, formidable figure. “Ah — fine weather,” says Papa Pasquier, as he steps outdoors, “or at least pretty good.” Although Author Duhamel obviously sympathizes with the hysterical, poetic Laurent, who tells the story, he nevertheless does not spare him. To shame his money-grubbing brother the penniless Laurent takes his first 1,000 francs and horrifies him by tearing it up and throwing it into the Marne. Not for a long time can Laurent steel himself to confess that while he was making his grandiose speech about poetry and greed, he was quietly pocketing 500 of the francs he pretended to have thrown away.