The first game of the seasonal double-header is one of the Maitre's beeline portraits of psychosis set once again in one of those quiet, quotidian, dusty provincial French villages. Here the hatter's phantoms are all too real as he engages in the serial murders of a midwife, a piano teacher, a woman in a notions shop, and on and on--preannounced and destined to stop with number seven. But then there's his querulous wife and their maid and the man who has seen the telltale evidence he doesn't disclose to a seemingly languid local police force. Quantitatively more, at any rate, from the man who has proved so often that less is more.