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"Thou Shalt Not Tamper Life"-- Louis Hemon

The Story. Monsieur Ripois rid himself of his palling mistress quite as simply as she would have shed her soiled blue wrapper. He yawned at her solicitude, snapped at her tenderness, sneered at her complaints, assumed high dudgeon when her desperation became vindictive. His sooty little conscience glowing at her quick repentance, out he marched, free to take a new lodging, walk the London streets after work and supper, fondle his mustache, boldly scrutinize passing women and wait, thinking himself a very audacious chap of the world indeed, for further chances to cheat life of amorous adventures where the women gave all and he, Amedee Ripois, gave nothing.

Winifred was next. A starving florist girl, she was so innocent she thought she had to go home with him because he gave her tea. She haunted his doorstep long afterwards, before turning prostitute.

He obtained Mabel with a clever mirage of Marriage, that sole, safe landmark on the foggy horizon of an English waitress.

Then Nemesis tricked him. He lost his job in the City; his few shillings went. Shivering nights on the Embankment and hunger's fang stirred him to a violent design. He would get a harlot to take him home, then rob her. At this crux, his tears accomplished what his nerve funked. Marcelle kept him that winter as "her man," a pathetic sop to her vestige of womanly honor. When Marcelle was jailed for soliciting, Monsieur Ripois was most adroit. He stole her savings and decamped to Cricklewood, where it occurred to him to advertise French lessons under a grandiose name.

Ella beheld Monsieur Ripois on Dollis Hill, stretching his arms to the spring sunshine in thanksgiving for his wellbeing, in vague supplication for something pure and fresh, possibly a new woman. Later, when he approached her, an erect, full-bosomed child-virgin, she did not see a little cad of 30-odd with a pale, muggy face, but remembered a man whose gesture had expressed the wonder she awaited in life. She made a dream of him, managed their whole affair in calm unquestioning ecstasy--quite the best affair he had ever had, thought Monsieur Ripois, until she told him they would marry now, for the child. At that Monsieur Ripois stole off and tried to materialize his greatest chance of all, incipient with Aurora Barnes, a rich, neurotic Francomaniac.

Mr. Barnes and his solicitor tripped that scheme. Monsieur Ripois' pupils dwindled away. Again poverty sniffed under his door. He decided he had loved, really loved, Ella. He would go back, say he was sorry, marry her.

He went. Ella's blind uncle proudly told him that the lorry had crushed her by accident. Monsieur Ripois knew better--much better. Pilfering meanly from life, he had failed to perceive and accept its rich free gift. The grief that came upon him, the suffering through another that he learned, was too great for even his cynical, acquisitive ego to shake off. Returning to France to beg on the roads, thought he: "How careful you have to be."

The Significance. What Amedee Ripois, as a moral exemplar, may mean to you or your brother matters little. But the way he enters your consciousness as an actual being, a vessel of forces, which simply cannot be tampered with in impunity, is perfectly astonishing. If you doubt that "realism" in literature is more than a word, read here. To add that the drab tale is spun with utmost delicacy is to belittle the reputation of the author of Maria Chapdelaine and Blind Man's Buff.

The Author. The late Louis Hemon, born in Brest in 1880, soon drifted out of the life of law and diplomacy for which his father, inspector-general of the university, trained him. He married, lived, wrote, in England, until, a widower at 31, grief drove him over the sea to Canada. In the Lac St. Jean country (Quebec), he worked on railroads. The hardy, simple French settlers, wearing out their lives "making land" out of stumps and rocks, appealed to him so strongly that he hired out to one Farmer Samuel Bedard at $8 per month. Farmer Bedard appeared as the father of Maria Chapdelaine in the novel that Hemon mailed, in 1913, to the Paris Temps, before shouldering his pack and heading west again. A letter from the Temps accepting the book returned to Paris marked "dead." Trudging the ties, Author Hemon had failed to hear a train.

* MONSIEUR RIPOIS AND NEMESIS--Louis Hemon--Macmillan ($2 00).