Tale of Two Sisters

THE IVORY MISCHIEF--Arthur Meeker Jr.-Houghton, Mifflin ($2.75).

The Ivory Mischief* is not what it seems. It seems another of those long (840-page), thickly upholstered Jumbos of period fiction, with an advance printing (including Book-of-the-Month Club) of a quarter of a million copies. But unlike most books of the type, its re-creation is solid, convincing and intimate, its characterizations are shrewd, its style adult, and even the upholstery is interesting.

Author Meeker really knows and likes his subject, which is 17th-Century France. None of his major incidents, none of his characters, are invented; there is none of the usual effort to hand the reader a night-school course in the political-military his tory of the age. Instead he sticks faithfully to a full account of the actual lives and for tunes of two absorbing Frenchwomen.

The sisters Cateau and Magdelon de la Louppe were born in the early 16305. They were among the most beautiful women in Europe. Starting as down-at-heel petty noblewomen, both made brilliant marriages, both took many lovers, both were involved in flamboyant scandals, both faded into lonely piety, and both lived, voraciously, to be 80. Aside from these parallels, their lives differed as sharply as their characters.

Magdelon used her beauty as a means to pleasure; Cateau used hers as an end in itself. Magdelon fell in love right & left; Cateau, barring her affair with the gold-leaf-like Due de Candale, was virtually incapable of love, even of much pleasure. In middle age Magdelon went for young men as some women go horsy; Cateau settled down to a kindly, lukewarm, almost suburban domesticity with a lover only twelve years her junior.

Shrewd Cateau became one of the richest women in France; feckless Magdelon sank deeper & deeper into debt.

In a play for power over the heirs-apparent to the Throne, she got into very hot water; one of her lovers, the Abbe Fouquet, betrayed her attempt as part of a conspiracy against the Throne. Most fantastic scene in the book is her midnight rendezvous with the swishy little Prince, she dressed in the robes of an Abbess, he in a white frock. When the Prince stops patting her cheek to offer her candy, she realizes her mistake.

To Author Meeker's credit he handles these somewhat Suetonian materials not only without playing them up for the salacious trade, but so firmly that they become a social and human document, richly textured with quotidian details of housekeeping, matchmaking, small-talk and general upper-class living. Even the glimpses of Court, of battle, of provincial life, have little of the quality of set pieces, much of the taste of immediacy. Few historical novels do as much.

*Theocritus called Beauty "an ivory mischief."

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