L'Amour the Merrier

LOVE AND THE FRENCH (368 pp.)

Nina Epton--World ($5).

Whether or not the French deserve their frequently self-bestowed laurels as great lovers, few would deny that they are consummate kiss-and-tell artists. Over the centuries, they have told all in diaries, letters, memoirs, novels and the social chronicles of boudoir, salon and brothel. With one eye on the lofty mystery of love and the other hovering at the keyhole, British Author Nina Epton scans the Gallic love parade in an amusing though helter-skelter review.

Romantic love did not always exist, says Author Epton. It was invented by the troubadours, the hobohemian minstrel poets of the late Middle Ages. Medieval ladies spent half their time racing across the jousting fields with buckets of hot water, bathing and bandaging strange men. It remained for the troubadours to glamorize the knight-lady relationship and raise it to the level of a semimystical romantic cult. For all their platonic, fig-leafy sentiments, the troubadours themselves were a crudely carnal lot, and they gave romance in France a lasting split personality: love and marriage became contradictory terms.

What Is Suitable. Medieval marriage was more fearful than joyful. Titled gentlemen thought nothing of punching their wives in the face, and ladies were often disfigured for life with broken noses. Husbands were cruelly vindictive to errant wives. When the Dame de Fayel's husband discovered that she kept her dead lover's heart in a casket, he had it plucked out and served up in a stew. Though the clergy openly kept concubines till the 16th century, bodily love bore the taint of anathema. Sample bedgear for many a medieval wife was the chemise cagoule, "a heavy nightdress with a suitably placed hole through which the husband could impregnate his wife while avoiding any other contact."

Clothes, or the lack of them, naturally obsessed the fashion-conscious French amorists. During the 14th and 15th centuries, women wore disconcertingly low-necked dresses, lacing their breasts so high that "a candlestick could be placed upon them." Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, pioneered a bare-to-the-waist style at court and also stopped the show at the palace by affecting a kind of girl-in-the-Hathaway-patch masking of one breast. Brazenly posing as a Madonna, she managed to have this piquant fashion immortalized by Painter Jean Fouquet.

Panties or knickers were invented because of Henry II's wife, Catherine de Medici, whose shapely legs were all too visible riding sidesaddle on windy days. Ironically, conservative 16th century moralists resisted the innovation. "Women should . leave their buttocks uncovered under their skirts," they said. "They should not appropriate a masculine garment but leave their behinds nude as is suitable for their sex."

Order of Aphrodites. But from the moralist's point of view, the worst was to come. It was the era of the great royal mistresses (Maintenon, Pompadour, Du Barry) and of the monsters of sex (notably the Marquis de Sade). It.was also the Age of Enlightenment, and medical science was eagerly enlisted in the service of love. Late in Louis XIV's reign, a certain Dr. Venette soberly advised that dried Egyptian crocodile kidneys pounded into a powder and diluted in sweet wine made the perfect aphrodisiac.

Perhaps the most advanced debauchee set the world has ever known was the French Order of the Aphrodites. The membership fee was -L-10,000 for a gentleman and -L-5,000 for a lady. The order was limited to 200 members, each of whom had to pass a rigorous three-hour test.

The Aphrodites' magnificent "country house" had an altar of love gods and goddesses and pink, taffeta-lined boxes for private love sessions, each fitted out with ingeniously placed peepholes. A journal of one of the female Aphrodites lists 4,959 amorous rendezvous in 20 years. This included 272 princes and prelates, 929 officers, 93 rabbis, 342 financiers, 439 monks, 420 socialites, 119 musicians, 47 Negroes and 1,614 foreigners ("during an enforced absence in London").

Came the Revolution. George Sand's grandmother once told her that "the Revolution brought old age into the world." Certainly, the tumbrils seemed to cart off some of the zest of Author Epton's chronicle. Napoleon, the self-made emperor, bolted his love affairs the way he bolted his meals. Lovers, who had been pretty vigorous since the Renaissance, again began to talk about dying. A book on How to Succeed in Love, published in 1830, suggested fainting fits, attacks of hysteria, and suicide threats. Morbid romanticism subsequently gave way to liaisons based on credit ratings. Toward the end of the century, some courtesans were known to vary the price of their favors depending on the fluctuations of the stock market.

To judge by the meager 30 pages she devotes to it, Historian Epton seems to feel that the 20th century is one of love's bear markets. Who killed Eros? Women did, by "becoming too much like men. Their curiosity value has declined." In compiling her Erostatistics, the author has done a lot to boost that curiosity value.

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