Love in a Court Climate

THE PRINCESS OF CLEVES (210 pp.)--Madame de Lafayette--New Directions ($ 1.50).

Take one distant century--say the 16th--and take it seriously. Add one princely husband, admiring and dull; one bride, beautiful and devout; one young lover, handsome and ardent. Stir the ingredients in a batter of love-at-first-sight and courtly ceremony; cook over a slow fire of virtue, grief and remorse; then sprinkle with fragments of broken hearts. This basic recipe for romance or rubbish is served up cold in Madame de Lafayette's Princess of Cleves.

Like many classics, this work, first published in 1678, has been read for generations only by schoolchildren and scholars. Nancy (Love in a Cold Climate) Mitford's new translation is an attempt to prove that it deserves a larger audience. Translator Mitford has tackled an almost desperately lost cause, for the chief interest of the book is still a curiosity interest: The Princess of Cleves happens to be the first novel that is recognizably "modern."

Beautiful Princess. Fundamentally, it is the story of the girl who marries the wrong man. "Absolutely dazzling . . . with her white skin, golden hair, classical features," Mlle. de Chartres appears at the court of Henry II of France. Everybody thinks her very beautiful, and the Prince of Cleves, a dim young man "prudent beyond his years," becomes her suitor. At her mother's urging, she marries him.Then she meets the Due de Nemours, "the most fascinating man at court," and realizes for the first time what true love is. The Princess has been too well brought up to break her marriage vows, but her princely husband, caddishly suspecting the worst, dies "with an admirable firmness of spirit" of a broken heart. After a decent interval, the Princess meets her lover and explains that, even now, she dare not marry him for fear that she might see his love for her grow cold. Despite anything he can say, she gives up the court and enters a convent.

The novel concludes: "Indeed her life, which was not a long one, provided an example of inimitable goodness." Also, a modern might add, of illimitable dullness.

Cynical Aphorist. As Nancy Mitford remarks in her lively introduction, the same cannot be said of Madame de Lafayette, who, after marrying a provincial boor and bearing him several children, spent the remainder of her life on the edges of Louis XIV's court engaged in an endless quest for preferment and place.

The outstanding member of her circle was that famous and cynical aphorist, La Rochefoucauld, who is supposed to have been her lover, although he was by then old, blind and gouty. He is also supposed to have collaborated on The Princess of Cleves, but the book has nary a line of the brilliance and insight of the man who once wrote, "There are people who would never have fallen in love had they never heard love discussed."

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