In the Passionless U. S.

MOREAU DE ST. MERY'S AMERICAN JOURNEY, 1793-1798 (394 pp.)--Translated and edited by Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts--Doubleday ($5).

Kenneth Roberts came across this diary while researching his latest novel, Lydia Bailey (TIME, Jan. 6), and got all excited about it. Written in French, and almost unknown in the U.S., the diary was a sophisticated study, by an observant French emigre, of the callow U.S. of the 1790s. Roberts persuaded his wife to translate it and polished the translation himself. First of Moreau de St. Mery's many works to be put into English, it is not to be compared for literary quality to the contemporary notes of another French traveler, Chateaubriand. But it introduces to U.S. readers a methodical diarist who jotted down thousands of free anthropological notes, the like of which is not to be found elsewhere. "So far as I am aware," says Roberts, "no American or foreign author has ever written with such startling frankness about . . . American women during the last decade of the 18th Century."

St. Mery, a Creole born in Martinique, distinguished himself by making monumental studies of the French West Indies which still occupy an important section of France's colonial archives. One of the ablest early leaders of the French Revolution, he was president of the Electors of Paris in 1789 and received the keys of the Bastille from its conquerors after the prison was stormed on July 14. Like many another French revolutionist, however, Moreau fell out with the Genius of the Terror, Robespierre. He and his family put out to sea from Le Havre on Nov. 9, 1793, just 24 hours before the agents of the guillotine arrived to arrest him.

The brig Sophie, of Portland, Me., wallowed for 119 days in Atlantic gales while the sickened French passengers grew more & more scandalized at the improvidence of American seamen. Items: the captain rarely reckoned their position, the ship carried no spare sailcloth to repair the rags she sailed by, the logbook covers had to be unraveled for thread to patch the sails, food and liquor were so carelessly stowed that quantities of both were lost. Americans, observed Moreau, "rely on luck more than on anything else in making a voyage."

Put ashore, half-dead, at Norfolk, the emigres found themselves in a swampy, slave-owning country where Negroes were "held in a state of debasement which astounds even the inhabitants of the [French] colonies." While noting that "nowhere does the English language have such sweetness and charm as on the lips of a pretty Virginian," Moreau found nothing pretty in the character of Virginia men, who "cultivated extremely long fingernails, with which to scratch out the eyes of those with whom they fight."

Brotherhood in the Bunk. In country inns he found the sheets blackened by previous travelers, and felt that brotherhood had been carried too far in the land of liberty when strangers were admitted to bunk with any guest during the night. He deplored the absence of curtains in bedroom windows, and the abundance of flies everywhere. As a bookseller and printer in Philadelphia, he contributed his bit to the future of U.S. civilization by selling contraceptives, which were soon "in great demand among Americans, in spite of the false shame so prevalent. . . ."

Among Moreau's observations of American women:

P: "They are cold and without passion . . . and . . . they endure the company of their lovers for whole hours without being sufficiently moved to change their expression. . . . [They] give themselves up at an early age to the enjoyment of themselves. . . ."

P: "The American women divide their whole body in two parts; from the top to the waist is stomach; from there to the foot is ankles."

P: "American women carefully wash their faces and hands, but not their mouths, seldom their feet and even more seldom their bodies."

P: "In the 'Back Countries' . . . young girls accede almost without hesitation to all caresses of men whom they have seen that day for the first time.. . ." If "When a Quakeress feels lecherous impulses, she notifies her husband of it and does her best to make him share her torment."

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