Amorous Autocrat

FRANCIS THE FIRST--Francis Hackett--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

''Observe this long-nosed personage with night-life in his narrowed eyes, eyes that have wept for the broken Virgin, eyes that have faced battle, caressed and lusted, heavy with cupidity, glazed with surfeit, once expectant as the sky in May. . . . He is a type of Frenchman not yet extinct nor likely to be extinct for centuries." So does Historian Francis Hackett introduce his latest hero, Francis I. Author Hackett's 448-page tome is compendious and scholarly but he does not believe that "history should be blonde-proof"; not simply dignified names and dates but Francis' blondes and brunettes figure largely in this narrative.

Francis I (1494-1547) lived at a lively time. A contemporary of Henry VIII, Erasmus, John Calvin, Rabelais, Machiavelli, he came to the French throne when monarchy meant owning the country. Only 20 when he became king, he found it delightful to be an autocrat. Did he want a chateau? He built it. A woman? He took her. The Mona Lisa? He bought it. Another province? He raised an army. But his political ambitions ended by embroiling him in a complicated series of expensive wars, and at the battle of Pavia he was captured by the German Emperor Charles V, imprisoned in Madrid and held for a nearly ruinous ransom.

Francis' unattractive wife, Claude, was kept too busy bearing him seven children to give him any cause for jealousy. But the beauteous Franc,oise de Foix, one of his mistresses, did. Francis' royal handling of an embarrassingly bourgeois situation became a classic. The intruder, surprised by Francis' unexpected knock, took shelter in the fireplace, which was screened by leafy boughs. Francis, as if unaware that anything was amiss, treated Franc,oise in his usual fashion, then relieved himself into the fireplace.

Whatever else he may seem to the modern reader, Biographer Hackett's Francis will not seem a lead-wrapped effigy, the stiffly antiquated memorial of a far-off day. Pat and proper to modern ears comes the comment of one of his courtiers, as Francis lay dying: "The old sport is passing out!" ("Le vieux gallant s'en va!")

The Author. From Kilkenny, Ireland, Francis Hackett came to the U. S. at 17, became a literary journalist, first in Chicago, then in Manhattan, where his weekly pages in The New Republic made town talk for eight years. In 1922 he stopped writing about books, began writing about men. Research for his Henry the Eighth took him six years. On Francis the First he spent five.

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