BANEFUL SORCERIES or The Countess Bewitched

Miss Sanders combining earlier interests (La Petite; The Nature of Witches) does a petit point of 17th France with many pins, figurines, and all kinds of charms and curses and soporifics which sometimes sedate her story. If a story it is, based on the memoir of one Margot Lalaunde who is forced to give up the man she loves (Jacques Lalaunde) to marry Jean-Achille, M. le Comte du Roc-sur-Besbre, with a record of ""sloth, murder and sodomy."" Although he's not up to much here--failing for the most part in bed and in health. She's also overcome by vertigo, specters, nightmares but still manages to flounce and flutter through most of this unharmed until the evil is dis-spelled. For some, perhaps an earlier version of pretty poison: others may find that all the va-et-vient through the court of Paris and the chambers of a rural chateau never achieves any central dramatic interest for which the diary form is a perhaps convenient excuse.