Forever Caroline

CAROLINE CHERIE (314 pp.) -- Cecil Saint-Laurent--Prentice-Hall ($3.50).

When Caroline de Bievre arrives in Paris early in the spring of 1789, she is "16, unkissed and avid for life." Some five years and 311 pages later, she has finished with one husband and four lovers (a couple of would-be seducers escape her), flirted with a Lesbian, inspired three killings, saved her pretty, blonde neck from the guillotine and sailed, still unjaded, for the U.S. After a sale of 300,000 copies in France, Novelist Cecil Saint-Laurent's account of all this has now been published in the U.S. It may bring out customers who haven't read a book since Forever Amber.

On her wedding night, Caroline discovers that her husband is a boor: he is "panting like a woodchopper felling young birches in the forests of Touraine." But since Georges is busy all day with politics, Young Birch Caroline soon gets a chance to branch out. Gaston de Salanches, for example, knows how to appreciate her. "My darling," he murmurs, "do you know that you have the most beautiful breasts in the world?" After a little more shoptalk, Caroline goes spinning "dizzily to unknown heights of ecstasy."

A bigger woodchopper splits up Caroline and Gaston -- the French Revolution. As enemies of the, republic, Caroline, her husband and a party of friends take to the roads, constantly ducking informers and dickering for their lodgings and lives.

Caroline never lacks for playmates. When a "young giant" of a stagecoach driver hides her in a hayloft, she senses that he is "in no mood for preliminaries." Moments later, "a thousand tiny spears of hay [bite] into her bare thighs." At novel's end, sans husband or other encumbering alliances, Caroline cheats the guillotine by dressing up in a sailor suit and reporting for duty on a French frigate bound for America.

What is the effect on the French navy? Author Saint-Laurent doesn't say. It may take a sequel.

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