Books: French Canvas

AMELIE AND PIERRE (338 pp.)—Henri Troyat—Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

To some French writers the production of novels is like the eating of salted almonds—they just cannot stop. Balzac turned out 17 volumes in compiling his Comédie Humaine, which pinned down 19th century life. Jules Remains, in his Hommes de Bonne Volonte, needed 27 books just to span the years from the eve of World War I to the eve of World War II. Author Troyat, 46, is trying hard to fit his stride to those giant footsteps: this book is the second of a series of related novels that is to be called The Seed and the Fruit and will use as its canvas the past half-century of French life.

In his first volume, Amelie in Love, published last year in the U.S., Troyat tenderly recounted the provincial courtship of Amelie Aubernat and Pierre Mazalaigue in the early 1900s. As this sequel opens, it is 1915. Pierre is a World War I infantry corporal at the front, while Amelie is struggling to run their Paris cafe, tend her infant daughter, and discipline her young brother, Dennis, who ricochets from the arms of a blowzy cashier to the inviting lingerie of a young laundress.

Behind these small lives and bourgeois problems, history unfolds like a rolling backdrop. There are vignettes of barbed wire and mud from the trenches, glimpses of the headlines and early newsreels of the period, episodes of the air war with the Parisian night crisscrossed by searchlights and rocked by the thud of primitive bombs. Author Troyat, Russian-born but an adoptive Frenchman since his youth, writes out of a passionate love of France. His Pierre and Amelie in their simplicity and capacity for goodness seem closer to the gentle peasant folk of Tolstoy than the rapacious villagers of Balzac. Yet even Amelie loses innocence as the book progresses: she learns how to connive with petty officialdom so that she can visit Pierre in the forward areas; she discovers her own frailty in turning away the love of a young Spaniard; she shows ruthlessness in extricating her father from a threatened marriage to his cook.

At the book’s end, the war is over for the Mazalaigues: badly wounded Pierre is back home; ambitious Amelie has taken an option on an even bigger cafe in Montmartre. Their daughter is growing into a beauty, and Author Troyat has enough sympathetic characters to carry him through at least a dozen more novels. Troyat, in this volume, is writing of Frenchmen who were still supremely confident of the future; reading it is a little like watching an unsuspecting man walk into a pleasant field sown with land mines.