Chasing the Chimera

THE GOUFFE CASE (434 pp.)-Joachim Maass-Harper ($4.95).

This new novel took 13 years to write and is well worth it. Based on an actual 1889 Paris murder, it offers a long, luxuriant plunge into the gaslit fin-de-siecle world, a time of clip-clopping hansom cabs, plush interiors, swan-necked women in little tilted hats, and dandified men ready to throw away their lives for love.

Sullen Lout. Gouffe, a well-to-do Parisian of respectable habits, vanishes and his brother-in-law Jacquemar appeals for help to Goron, the potbellied, hamster-cheeked chief of police. In some hundred pages of hard work and intuitive skill, Goron pieces together the scanty clues, finds Gouffe's body and arrests his undoubted murderers-a sullen lout named Eyraudt, who had fled to, of all places, Chicopee, Mass., and a young prostitute named Gabrielle Bompard, who makes even the smoldering Justine of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet appear fairly innocuous by comparison.

Gabrielle is the ancient Chimera brought to life--the head of a lioness, clawlike hands, a goatish nature. When Jacquemar first glimpses this temptress, "her beauty aroused in him an irresistible, nameless thirst which, if it was sexual, seemed to endow sexuality with a new role in the world." Coolly, she insists on her innocence in l'affaire Gouffe and puts to rout all of Policeman Goron's neatly assembled evidence. Protectors rise on every side: prominent lawyers, wealthy men, the demonstrating street mobs of Paris and Marseille. Her luckless partner goes off to the guillotine, but triumphant Gabrielle is freed, and sails for the U.S. with a dazzled financier named Carapin.

Chinese Magician. Jacquemar, determined that justice be done, trails her to Saratoga Springs, where Gabrielle has already cut her customary deadly swath: Carapin is enfeebled, one elderly U.S. admirer has died, another is on the verge of suicide. Her task is made easy by the trifling competition of U.S. women, who, though pretty, "were devoid of fragrance like immortelles, coarsened into mannishness by some deep disappointment, and hostile to the male." Jacquemar, no Bellerophon, is unable to slay this particular Chimera. He falls hopelessly in love with Gabrielle and is endlessly deceived. Watching as she frolics with a farm boy, Jacquemar thinks: "The bitch is democratic." Age, status or wealth mean nothing to her "so long as she can do harm."

German-born Author Maass, 60, has gifts like those of a Chinese magician: out of old newspaper pages about an obscure crime, he has proliferated a great flowering of sin and scenery, myth and mysticism. He resembles Simenon in his ability to evoke swiftly a street, a room, a city. In the final chapters, there is an unfortunate settling down of Gothic and miasmal mist, but even here, Gabrielle Bompard is wildly and insistently alive, whether jabbing a coachman with her imperious parasol or grumbling crossly at a tired lover: "Is it my fault if men overestimate their capacities?" Many readers, like Jacquemar himself, may be horror-stricken to find that they "cannot help loving this terrible woman."

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