Our Man in Paris

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ANDRE MAUROIS. 396 pages. Washington Square Press. $5.95.

In American eyes, Andre Maurois was the official, standard model of the perfect Frenchman: urbane, epigrammatic, totally literate and beyond despair. A connoisseur of the senses, he believed that "the world of appearance is the only one we will ever know." While the existentialist crowds stormed intellectual bastilles, he coolly sat down to write in his luxurious apartment overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, carefully dressed for literature (blue serge suit, quiet four-in-hand, expensive leather carpet slippers). An unabashed Anglophile, he became a one-man diplomatic corps to the English-speaking world; from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, he was Our Man in Paris.

He looked back on the past of others--Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Proust, Disraeli--and returned them to life in supremely readable biographies. When he died last month at 82, Maurois was best remembered and eulogized for those biographies. But he possessed other skills, as is shown by his Collected Stories, published a few days after his death. He was a distinguished partisan in the only warfare the French ever enjoyed, and the only fight Americans think that they have pressed hard--the battle of the sexes. "One must make the choice between loving women and knowing them; there is no middle course," said Nicolas Chamfort, 18th century epigrammist. True for most men, but not for Maurois. He loved women, and he knew them.

Lovers & Cars. The 38 stories read like the notebook of a benign confessor. Most of them are about women--beautiful and rich, wise and foolish, vital and declining, ensnaring and ensnared in a love trap. Or if not in love, then remembering what it was like and regretting the flight of passion. Maurois' women give to friendship only what they steal from love; they give to love only what their husbands have forgotten how to take. His couples are always married but rarely to one another. They change lovers the way Americans trade cars. The transfers usually take place for the same reasons--novelty and the pride of ownership. Maurois uses these affairs of passion for classic purposes--to reveal character and find irony rusting the most intense of emotions. Talked out of marrying the wrong American, the heroine of Home Port marries his French equivalent. "You don't change a person's nature," she admits later. "You retouch it."

In his finest story, The Fault of M. Balzac, Maurois brings the full weight of irony crashing down on a brilliant but ambitious scholar. "A really distinguished mistress would spare me ten years of setbacks and sordid intrigue," says Lecadieu. He gets one, a politician's wife. He also gets caught. Exiled from Paris, forced to marry a worn-out woman, he ends up a wreck teaching Latin texts to schoolboys. He can't even remember what his ambition was.

The Somerset Maugham of adultery, Maurois framed his stories as conversations, recollections, letters. Their narrative line is sure, their characters well etched, their climaxes cutting. With a wave of his magician's hand he dismisses doubt. Maurois himself thought his stories "may be the best things I have written." Perhaps. More likely they are best as clues to his personality and his success.

Excess of Sympathy. Born Emile Herzog, son of an Alsatian Jewish industrialist, Maurois fled the family textile works and served as a liaison officer to the British army during World War I before taking up his writing career. Despite his gifts of dialogue and invention, his fiction existed within the bounds of bourgeois convention. "I wrote about a rather limited world," he admitted. When he tried to do otherwise, he produced cliches. The interplanetary observers of The Life of Man saw human beings behaving like ants. In The Departure, the dead queue up to board airplanes. Typically, Maurois chose his biographical subjects for personality, the test being "whether I can get on with this man or this woman." Therefore, the biographies, like his stories, suffered from an excess of sympathy.

Maurois was a lover, not a critic, of mankind. His art paid a price for it. His romantic world was always tidier than its sloppy model. Yet his elegant narrowness brought him intimacy with an audience of millions seeking in literature the order that life denies. The irony would not have escaped him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.