Parisian Idyll

MITSOU--Colette--Boni ($2).

"How Girls Grow Wise" is the subtitle. The brief story is that of a Montmartre revue star--her love-affair with a young French lieutenant. Superficially neither an artistically promising nor a morally edifying subject, it grows under Author Colette's intuitive fingers into a completely charming, almost persuasive idyll.

Mitso, serious, ambitious, profoundly sensible, is the ''friend" of a Man of Means. She has never been really in love. One night backstage she meets a handsome young lieutenant on leave from the front. She is more than correct, he is slightly embarrassed, but they begin I correspondence which ends in a meeting on his next leave. They spend one night together. The lieutenant thinks Mitsou's letters are better than Mitsou, is glad to leave her, pretends he will come back. He is fond of her, she is in love with him.

Author Colette's sympathies are so much with her heroine that she makes Mitsou not wiser than she could be, perhaps, but too coherently wise. Example: "Old people love to make jokes about life behind the scenes as if they knew, all about it, and they give little dry chuckles while they talk." The reader will agree with the author's (unspoken) comment: Mitsou is too good for her Lieutenant in Blue.

The Author. Gabrielle Colette, 57, foremost living French woman writer, was born in the provinces of bourgeois parents, still speaks French with a Burgundian accent. Onetime barnstormer, dancer, Colette draws, writes music, has recently written a ballet for Composer Maurice Ravel. She knows so much about food that even the French consider her a gourmet. Animal-lover, she keeps wild dogs, wild cats in her Paris apartment. She reads very little. Short, thickset, she has wood-colored hair, long grey slanting eyes, speaks in a deep alto. Other books: Cheri, La Vagabonde. La Naissance du Jour, L'Entrave.

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