Joan or Lucrezia

Festively bedecked elephants, a troop of mounted horsemen and colorful floats paraded through the streets of Saigon last week. It was Women's Day, an occasion organized and supervised by South Viet Nam's most bitterly debated female, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. To some she is an Asian Joan of Arc, to others an Oriental Lucrezia Borgia.

A fragile-looking but tough-minded beauty of 38, Madame Nhu is the wife of President Ngo Dinh Diem's brother and closest brain-truster, serves as her bachelor brother-in-law's official First Lady. Around Madame Nhu and her husband swirls much of the opposition to Diem's regime. Critics blame their considerable influence on Diem for the excesses of his government, argue that he would become more tractable and his administration more liberal if he got rid of them.

Puritanical Feminist. Zealous and sincere in her single-minded belief that only Diem can solve South Viet Nam's problems, Madame Nhu tirelessly preaches the merits of "personalism," a mixture of Confucianism, autocracy and Catholic morality, that President Diem calls his "formula" of government. Like Diem, Madame Nhu is intolerant of criticism, last week lashed out at the "pseudo-liberalism" of those who questioned Diem's restrictive measures. She indirectly blamed the West for Communist gains in South Viet Nam, because the U.S. should have realized the pressing need for anti-guerrilla forces as far back as 1955, and scored some points when she deplored "the progress of neutralism in the world favored by the inability of Western democracy to protect all those that Communism covets."

A puritan as well as a feminist, Madame Nhu is the founder and president of the 1,000,000 Women's Solidarity Movement, a sort of Asian Junior League that has set up nurseries, maternity clinics, social welfare centers, kindergartens and night schools. Three years ago, the National Assembly passed her family bill, which banned polygamy and concubinage, set up stiff penalties for adultery, outlawed divorce except by permission of the President. Currently, Madame Nhu is plugging a social purification law that would outlaw taxi dancers, prizefighting and other ''immoral" entertainment.

Scratch the Scabby Sheep. Sent to French schools in Hanoi by her rich lawyer father (now South Viet Nam's Ambassador to the U.S.), Madame Nhu still speaks only halting Vietnamese, converses mostly in French. She met her future husband while wandering through a library where he was chief archivist, married him in 1943. Three years later, she was captured by the Communist Viet Minh while her husband was away on a trip; she was held prisoner in a remote village until, with the help of a Catholic partisan, she escaped to be reunited with Nhu in Saigon.

After Diem took office in 1954, his brother and sister-in-law moved into the Freedom Palace with him. Nhu advised his brother on army promotions, official appointments and business contracts. Inevitably Saigon gossip linked Nhu and his wife to government graft. Madame Nhu indignantly denies the charge. "Money enslaves people," she says, "I use money in the most artistic way when I have it."

Last month's aerial assassination attempt on Diem found Madame Nhu in the presidential palace with three of her four children (two girls 16 and 2, two boys 13 and 9). She fell two stories through a hole in the floor, was painfully cut and bruised, still moves with difficulty. The attack has made her even less tolerant of Diem's opponents. She says: "We will track down, neutralize and extirpate all these scabby sheep."

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