CÉCILE PARMI NOUS: ""Cecile In Our Midst

This is the seventh volume in the Pasquier Chronicles, which, though particularly French in context and approach, received a distinguished press over here last Spring. (Henry Holt) This volume does not differ greatly from the previous ones in the cycle, a well-studied, sober panorama of French middle class life. Cecile, a pianist with a remarkable talent, is the focus of this volume. Married to a directionless pseudo --intellectualist who is incapable of any disinterested thought or feeling, she becomes increasingly restless, finding escape through catholicism and in her extravagant love of her small boy. The climax is reached at the death of the child which is a very moving scene in an otherwise stolid, careful picturization of the bourgeois, post-war world.