Books: Paris in the Fall

WITCHES' SABBATH by Maurice Sachs. 315 pages. Stein & Day. $7.50.

Maurice Sachs enjoys a curious underground notoriety in the French literary world. Although he died young (at 36, in 1943) and wrote little—a number of moderately successful plays and several volumes of middling poetry—he knew most of the Parisian literary lights of the late '20s and early '30s and became, by his own testimony, "an ear into which they dropped their most private avowals." More important, he recorded some of those avowals in his autobiography, which he called his "moral memo" to...