THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ANDRÉ MAUROIS. 396 pages. Washington Square Press. $5.95.
In American eyes, André Maurois was the official, standard model of the perfect Frenchman: urbane, epigrammatic, totally literate and beyond despair. A connoisseur of the senses, he believed that "the world of appearance is the only one we will ever know." While the existentialist crowds stormed intellectual bastilles, he coolly sat down to write in his luxurious apartment overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, carefully dressed for literature (blue serge suit, quiet four-in-hand, expensive leather carpet slippers). An unabashed Anglophile, he became...