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A FINE OF 200 FRANCS by Elsa Tolet

A FINE OF 200 FRANCS

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Pub Date: July 14th, 1947
Publisher: Reynal & Hitchcock

By the wife of Louis Aragon, novelist and leading writer of the Resistance, these ""Three Short Novels of the Underground"" sustain their interest through the writing, which is discerning, often subtle, their exactitude of character detail, rather than through their narratives. For these are not short stories in the accepted sense -- but rather extensive portraits; of Juliette, typist, whose youth and prettiness is matched by her courage as she becomes active in the Resistance; of Alexander Slavsky, second generation Frenchman and painter, Honriette the wife who cared for him and mothered him but did not elicit the love that Cathie did, both derelicts of the war and remaining outside of it; and finally of Louise, who had lost a child and a lover, been interned, but had not lost the strength to resist -- until her execution in '43. For a literary, also a liberal, audience.