Ah, Paris!

Last week Paris was enjoying its first public art hoax since the war.

Act I: Salon de la Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts jurymen ponderously examined a group of paintings secretly padded with two genuine masterpieces--a Whistler and a Mary Cassatt. "Not bad, not bad at all," the jurymen agreed.

Act II: Paris art critics dismissed the exhibition, masterpieces and aspiring blobs alike, as "nothing exceptional."

Epilogue: slick, fashionable Portraitist Jean-Gabriel Domergue, who perpetrated the hoax, asked the public to guess, by ballot, which and what the jokers were. Only one voter found the Cassatt, no one spotted the Whistler.

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