Never Love an Idealist

LADY L. (215 pp.)--Romain Gary--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

There are few genuine anarchists around these days, but those of them who happen to read Lady L. will be as infuriated as if a king, marked for assassination, caught their homemade bomb and threw it back at them. French Novelist Romain Gary, who wrote one of the best and most serious novels of 1958 in The Roots of Heaven, has turned out what is bound to be one of the most urbanely amusing novels of 1959. The Roots of Heaven was a poetic last stand in the name of freedom. Lady L. is for freedom, too--freedom from people who are so grimly determined to make men free that they lose sight of humanity and become petty tyrants themselves.

Lady L. is a literary confection, as light and spry, and in its way as corny, as if it did not have an idea between its covers. The lady of the title is one of the last grandes dames of England. One of her grandsons is a director of the Bank of England, another will soon be a bishop, and a third is a Cabinet minister--although she can remember when a politician at her dinner table would have been as unthinkable as an American. She is 80 on the day the book opens, but she is still so beautiful and witty that England's beknighted poet laureate, Sir Percy Rodiner, trots beside her, constantly begging her to marry him. Like everyone else, Sir Percy thinks she is a noblewoman of French birth, but on this day (what can a lady lose at 80?) she puts matters straight.

The Pygmalion Treatment. To his mounting horror, Sir Percy learns that Lady L. was born Annette Boudin, the daughter of a Paris washerwoman. In due course, like most of the girls of her street, she became a prostitute. But she was beautiful, and soon the top banana of French anarchists. Armand Denis, gave her the Pygmalion treatment. He made a lady of her so that she could play with the very rich and arrange burglaries to finance Armand's assassination plans for the good of humanity.

Armand was as beautiful as a Greek god and as humorless as a congress of social workers. Annette loved him and tried to make a man of him, and some nights she succeeded. But humanity had to be saved, bombs had to be thrown, and Annette soon became bored. She married, in turn, a couple of impeccable British aristocrats, but she went on loving Armand--to the point of helping him to rob her own guests. But in the end she realized that she could never possess him as other women possess their men. "He was a selfish, egotistical, self-indulgent man who loved nothing but humanity . . . She had been unlucky. She could have loved a gambler, an opium addict, a common thief, a drunkard--but no, it had to be an idealist."

Humiliating Ride. Under these circumstances. Lady L. knew what she had to do and she did it--as the horrified Sir Percy learns at book's end. Despite the grisly finish, Novelist Gary tells Lady L.'s story as slickly and amusingly as if it were an effortless potboiler between more serious efforts--which for him it probably is. But underneath the fun it is also plain that Gary is taking some familiar types for a humiliating ride--all those who love humanity so much that they cannot love people, who can give everything to a cause except their hearts.

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