THE SCANDAL OF SOPHIE DAWES—Marjorie Bowen—Appleton-Century ($2.50).
During the reign of fat, cunning, democratic King Louis Philippe, an extraordinary crime, involving a smuggler's daughter, a great prince and the royal family, shocked a France that had become thoroughly accustomed to lurid intrigues and vile conspiracies. The smuggler's daughter was Sophie Dawes, brawny, coarse, mean-tempered Englishwoman from the Isle of Wight. The prince was Louis Henri Joseph, Duc de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, who had picked Sophie up in a London brothel. She was given great estates by her lover, was received by the king, moved in the highest French society despite her lack of tact, her shameless social climbing and her inability to speak the language. Beginning by amusing her super-aristocratic lover she soon dominated him, beat him occasionally and was generally suspected of strangling him to death. In her peaceful old age she retired to enjoy her riches and the protection of the king.
Marjorie Bowen recounts ''with scrupulous exactitude" Sophie Dawes's strange and fascinating story in a volume that for originality and vigor makes most contemporary biographies look frail. No hero worshipper. Author Bowen calls Sophie a vulgar wanton, a young slut, compares her with a gutter rat, declares that "her worthlessness and the squalor of her tale is duly recognized by the author." Nevertheless she manages to draw a convincing flesh & blood portrait of her subject. Although The Scandal of Sophie Dawes, for all its impressive documentation, emphatically does not solve the great mystery of Sophie's career, it does outline the problem in a manner calculated to provoke thoughtful speculation.
France had not recovered from the shock of revolution when the Prince de Condé first met his appalling mistress. The last of his family, weak, lazy, amiable, vicious, the Prince "had gained nothing from his very distinguished birth but the melancholy grace that marked his tall person, and long, slightly sheeplike face." In addition to the loss of his estates and honors, the revolution had cost the Prince his son, and most of his ambition. In 1814 his enormous wealth was restored to him and Sophie, whose influence was then uncertain, followed him to Paris, endured rebuffs and humiliations, waited, wrote cunning letters and cherished the one great stupid passion of her life—to be received at court. Slowly she ingratiated herself, devoting her tenacity, her resourcefulness, her frowsy full-blown beauty to the sordid ends of money and social position. No romance graced her relationship with the Prince. "On neither side was there any but ignoble passions . . . the lover's half senile lust . . . the mistress's vulgar greed for vulgar gains." Sophie was an example of a "common, inoffensive human weakness, snobbishness, provoking murder, most appalling of human crimes."