Expatriates in search of adventure

VOUR Women in Search of an Ideal (Collins, 30s.) is a brilliantly conceived book and one of Vincent Cronin's best. He takes four women of different countries and dazzling background, who had little in common except their determination to enjoy romantic love and adventure.
Their dreamy idealism, inspired mainly by Scott and Byron, is their only shared characteristic. The ladies are not isolated portraits—as they might have become in a less well constructed book— but representatives of a move. merit that is carefully sketched through the course of the book. These is a fascinating, almost inevitable, harmony in it.
Mr. Cronin has to go back to Ilth century Provence and its courtly love for a comparison with the kind of love that is his theme here. He sees four features similar to
both : humility, courtesy,
erotic religion and adultery.
All his models are VSpatriates—Caroline de Berry, from Naples; Marie d'Agoult, of mixed German and French blood; Eva Hanska, a Pole; and the Russian, Marie Bashkirtseff. Paris, which Mr. Cronin knows so well, fascinated and, for a time, held them all. Their captures included Balzac, Liszt and Charles de Berry, heir to the French throne, There is no fiction in the book; all the dialogue is from records.
What struck me most in
reading Four Women in Search of an Ideal was Mr. Cronin's new-found maturity. He has always been a skilful and elegant writer; here he has complete confidence in his talents and is much more ready to reveal his own standpoint.
To enter into details of each study would be to spoil the story. Caroline de Berry attracted me most, for her romanticism was grounded in history. When she failed to raise Veqdie for her son, Henri V. she comforted herself with the talc of Robert Bruce, who was defeated seven times before-he won his throne.
In prison at Blaye she wrote letters in lemon juice, which she smuggled out on Sunday morning's in an acolyte's scapular. She was the first lady at the court of France to dress in trousers, as some of Scott's heroines did.
At Dieppe she set the fashion for sea-bathing, until then the pastime only of idiots and persons suffering from dropsy. Tied to the end of a rope and wearing thick list slippers to protect her toes from crab bites, she was carried into the water by a male escort and splashed about for the space of an Ave Maria.
Her bathing companion on several occasions was Marie d'Agoult, a golden-haired girl from the Sacred Heart Convent in Paris, where the only mirror in the school building hung in the sacristy. Marie was later Liszt's lover.
All these ladies saw life in the terms of the novels they had read as children. All missed their ideal except for Marie Bashkirtseff, who attained it accidentally only after her death. Mr. Cronin is not guilty of a dull page.
Philip Caraman.