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Each year a group of French literary notables and near-notables meets for lunch at the Restaurant Drouant in Paris, and votes for the winner of the Goncourt Prize. They are the members of the Goncourt Academy, and their sole function is that of awarding 5,000 francs to the author of "the year's best work of fiction." There are supposed to be ten members at the luncheon, but the venerable revolutionary writer, Lucien Descaves, refuses to attend meetings with Royalist Leon Daudet, always mails in his vote. After lunch, the Academy's youngest member announces the prizewinner to waiting newspapermen. Within an hour red bands marked Prix Goncourt have been wrapped around copies of the winning book in Paris bookstores, because the Goncourt Prize, though it involves a small cash award, sells more books than any other literary prize in France, usually makes its winner the year's bestseller.

Last December one member of the Goncourt Academy died, and the remaining nine, most of them well above 70, disagreed about his successor. Candidates included Humorist Tristan Bernard, Novelists Colette and Jules Romains. But for 23 years Leon Daudet has been beating the drum for his fellow Royalist, dramatist and novelist, gushy Rene Benjamin. Little known in the U. S., where few of his books have been translated, Benjamin is known in France as a winner of a Goncourt Prize himself, as General Franco's most lyric supporter. Interviewing Franco last year, Benjamin called the general beautiful, lovely, ravishing, mysterious, tender and pure. "He is not tall," rhapsodized Author Benjamin, "his body is timid. Ah! His glance is unforgettable!"

Last week Leon Daudet got his way, made Author Benjamin the tenth member of the Goncourt Academy. To French observers his election meant that the Academy, originally politically independent, had at last become as reactionary as Author Daudet has been trying to make it.

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