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France's famed Roman Catholic novelist, Francois Mauriac, said the book was clearly written by the devil, and that did not harm its sales. He might have said the same of many other Frenchwomen's novels, notably 32-year-old Danielle Hunebelle's Philippine. The pretty young thing of 20 who tells the story manages to seduce a man of more than 50 after failing with his wife. "Had anyone objected," the heroine declares, that loving "leads to hell, I would have replied that one wins one's soul in losing it."
The latest novel by 47-year-old Simone de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins, is now the sensation of Paris (an earlier De Beauvoir novel has just appeared in the U.S.—TIME, Feb. 7). In December Les Mandarins (roughly, The Intellectuals) won France's fattest literary prize, the Goncourt. Novelist Albert Camus and Author de Beauvoir's great and good friend, Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, are thinly disguised principals. "These new Platos," one critic wrote, "talk slang like street cleaners, express themselves as sewer diggers no longer express themselves."
Love & Deepened Voices. Not all French women writers are as fiercely intellectual as Simone de Beauvoir or as sensationally sexy as the kiss-and-write girls. Louise de Vilmorin, 48, author of the brilliant little tragicomic gem, Madame De (TIME, Oct. 11), writes books that are always impeccably elegant, and 47-year-old Renée Massip's La Regente is a sensitive psychological study of an unhappy girl and a domineering mother. French women writers, as diverse in personality as in subject matter, range from glamorous Silvia Monfort, 30, whose Droit Chemin is about a professor who tries to command people as he commands ideas, to Danielle Roland, 38, the retiring wife of a physician, who wrote a moving fantasy (L'Huissier et le Sergent) of a Milquetoast dreaming about strength.
Whatever their faults, the novels have astonishing qualities. If many French women writers happily strip in public, that may be because, as 23-year-old Novelist Elisabeth Trévol puts it: "We are afraid to write a woman's book, so we try to deepen our voices. We discover how easy and amusing it is to talk of things 'taboo.' That shamelessness is a bit forced." But the majority of the women novelists, even the beginners, are sure-handed craftswomen. The best of them do not trade on their femininity, want to be judged as writers. Says Dominique Aubier, a perceptive lady critic and novelist: "The book arrives alone . . . but it's signed. The first name is enough. The effect is magic . . . The critics think more of the sex than of the text. But [literature] is not the privilege of one sex, and the liberty or joy of living not a right of birth. We are taking it."
Just how creative French women writers can be was demonstrated by the 70 novelists in the Elle picture. While turning out 256 novels, they also bore 82 babies.