In Flanders Fey

THE WOLF AT THE DOOR--Robert Francis--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

In 1928 appeared a U. S. translation of The Wanderer, by one Alain Fournier, an un-Gallic romantic masterpiece of the same order as W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions and Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age. Author Alain Fournier was killed in the War, and The Wanderer was his only book, but that his influence was still alive in France was shown last week, with the U. S. publication of "Robert Francis' " The Wolf at the Door (original title: La Grange aux Trois Belles). As different as could be from such trail-blazing contemporaries as Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Journey to the End of the Night) and Andre Malraux (Man's Fate), "Robert Francis" (real name: Jean Godme) follows his romantic bypath in the footsteps of Alain Fournier, Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen. Critics will note a long gap between Author Francis and the men he trails, but readers who are sick & tired of painful realism may well find surcease in The Wolf at the Door.

Not really a fairy story, Author Francis' tale is clothed in realism, but wanders into grotesque fancies that lie far from weekday life. Narrator of the story is Catherine, who tells her son this history of the childhood she spent in a Flanders farmhouse, in the years following the Franco-Prussian War.

Catherine was the second of three daughters; her mother was a long-suffering woman who shared her daughters' adoration for their father, a wife-beating drunkard who had brought back a wooden leg from the war. As the children grew up, the eldest became a zealous partner in her father's milk business, but the two younger ones, Catherine and Angele, each dreamed of the boy who was to marry her some day. At last he came, disguised as an old toymaker. Thereafter he appeared in various guises, but he finally turned out to be the long-lost but still young son of an impoverished nobleman. Though both girls were in love with him, it was Angele who married him. Catherine was terribly jealous of her sister's happiness, but when she came home from her strange school to find Angele deserted, her jealousy vanished, and she helped Angele keep up the hopeless pretense that some day her gipsy-like husband would come home.

Most of the 60-odd characters are a queer lot. Catherine's greatest friends were a retired courtesan, a worn-out sea captain, and the gravedigger's daughter, who was considered hardly decent because her only dress was a sack. At the inn where peg-legged Pamploix spent his evenings the innkeeper's wife was so squint-eyed that habitues would order a drink from one end of the bar, then slink quickly to the other end, where the drink would be served. It was the great ambition of the baker's old father, a paralytic, to assert his independence by running away to the cemetery, but as the little cart on which he propelled himself could only move in a circle, he never got there. Aunt Tirelo, like David Copperfield's Mr. Dick, was engaged on an endless historical work, proving that the sorrows of France were the fault of Marie Antoinette. Monsieur Jarridge, a notary, was in charge of the legal affairs of 99 lunatics, and amused himself by mixing up the files, finally by burning the records, declaring that his clients were quite capable of managing their own affairs.

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