Cloak-&-Sworders

PRINCE OF FOXES (433 pp.)--Samuel Shellabarger--Little, Brown ($3).

THE MONEYMAN (434 pp.)--Thomas B. Costain--Doubleday ($3).

''This tiresome betrothal of mine with Francesco della Rovere! And you're still not lord of Citt`a del Monte. Six months to wait--six months at least! Perdition!"

"Long, indeed, Madonna." Once again he held her hand against his lips.

Hammocks up and defenses down, hot-weather fugitives all over the U.S. will soon be taking to passages like this. The prediction is safely made, since the authors of both these books, and their publishers, know what they are up to. Author Shellabarger's Captain from Castile sold over 1,250,000. Thomas B. Costain is the man "who gave you The Black Rose" (sales 1,344,000). Now each gives the Renaissance a lush and wordy going-over. The Moneyman, Book-of-the-Month Club special "midsummer" choice,* is 15th Century France. Prince of Foxes, Literary Guild choice for August, is 16th Century Italy.

The moneyman is Jacques Coeur, royal financier of Charles VII (the weak Charles of Joan of Arc's day). Joan has long since been burned at the stake in Rouen, but the wicked English still hold the city, and one of Jacques' jobs is to turn them out. Another is to find Charles a new mistress. Along a country road comes golden-haired Valerie Maret, beautiful in her tender innocence and tattered cloak. "By St. Martin of Tours," cries Jacques. "Remarkable! There can be no doubt about it. Yes, my argus-eyed Nicolas, this is the one."

Author Costain lays on the local color thick--duels, tortures, trials, Valerie rising naked from her bath, and plenty of antique dressmaking chatter. As lavish with his color, Author Shellabarger is much the subtler hand with characters and story--though in this field "subtle" is strictly a comparative term. Prince of Foxes begins in Venice, with Andrea Orsini bowing low before the lovely Camilla degli Baglioni. Foxy Andrea can tell that Camilla is una illustrissima, but how is Camilla to know that Andrea, for all his fine clothes, is the son of a blacksmith? Prince of Foxes is laid in the same era as Somerset Maugham's trashy recent novel about Machiavelli. When it comes to the vital business of battles, eye-gougings, jeweled garters, entrancing moles on the thigh, and the neighing of palfreys, Shellabarger writes rings around the Maugham of Then and Now.

* B-O-M long ago abandoned the confining practice of picking a book of the month: it often picks two. Now, with an added "midsummer" book, it is giving itself a 13-month year.

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