French Waugh

THE BEST BUTTER (247 pp.)--Jean Uutourd--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

In 1940, Monsieur and Madame Poissonard are a modest little Parisian couple who keep a modest little dairy shop called An Bon Beurre. In 1950 the Poissonards have 47 million francs, a garish apartment, a country estate, and a son-in-law who is a member of parliament. The shortest distance between these two points is crooked--and savagely funny. French Satirist Jean (A Dog's Head) Dutourd has lampooned not only war profiteers but France itself, a country which has earned more justly than England, the reputation of being "a nation of shopkeepers."

Cash-Register Clausewitz. As they scurry out of Paris before the Nazi Panzers and Stukas in the summer of 1940, Papa and Mama Poissonard and family seem no better off than anyone else Papa is built like a beer barrel and Mama like a bathtub, but they do have a nose for news, and word reaches them within a week that the Germans are most "correct." They race back to the Bon Beurre, to do a little business-as-usual.

"What discipline!" says Charles-Hubert (papa) when he sees a Wehrmacht brass band. "After all, they're human beings too," says Julie (mama). Julie, who met Charles-Hubert at a bargain counter where "their hands clasped over a pair of socks at a reduced price," is a kind of Clausewitz of the cash register. Her axiom: wars are long and rations get short. The Poissonards stock the Bon Beurre fore and aft. Tins of ham as big as ox livers prop up the conjugal bed. Sausages hang thick as stalactites from the ceiling. On the floors stand wheels of Gruyere and slabs of Cantal cheeses, "the mighty pillars of this Temple of Foresight." Rationing is declared, and Julie beholds a vision come true, all the neighbors "down on their knees before the Bon Beurre, like sinners before the altar."

The customers are not only mercilessly fleeced (watered milk, tapped scales) but also lectured on the virtues of the Germans, the vices of the French, the cunning treachery of the Jews. Papa Poissonard is a happy man: "He had found the means to be systematically dishonest, that dream of all honest people, and . . . felt not in the least ashamed of it."

Brave Little Hens. When the earnings report of July 1942 shows 6 lbs. of ingots, 208 napoleons and 40,000 francs a month from assorted speculations, the Poissonards decide to pay their respects to the head of state, Marshal Petain. They bring him a box of duck eggs, and the ancient hero of Verdun mumbles: "Brave little hens of France." But soon it is time for the Bon Beurre to butter up a new power. A good year before war's end, the Poissonards are tactfully praising DeGaulle in public, and Charles-Hubert becomes a hero of the Resistance when he betrays a timid little German friend to the underground, all the while kicking him in the shins and shouting, "Dirty Boche!''

For U.S. readers who find the novels of social protest a bore, and U.S. writers who frequently hack the life out of such themes as Dutourd's, The Best Butter is a highly entertaining reminder that in good social criticism, the pin is mightier than the sword.

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