Books: Clay and Fire

THE WITCHES by Françoise Mallet-Joris. 391 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

To a remarkable degree, these three short novels about witchcraft in 16th and 17th century France seem to have been observed and recorded, rather than written. The characters are not propelled here and there by the author; their movements are their own. This is true of all good fiction, of course. Stories and novels are not clockwork but life systems, given energy by the author's inner eye.

Yet Françoise Mallet-Joris's observation is unusually wary and intense, perhaps because her creatures move in a society held rigid by theology where diabolism is as real as rock—a milieu not merely strange but very nearly incomprehensible to a mind formed in the 20th century. A modern student can read the documents—the witch-burners were articulate enough—but statistics and dry records are unlikely to convey to him any idea of the atmosphere that hangs for days, according to the author, in a town square after a witch has been burned. Is the smell, for instance, reassuring, since it signifies that evil has been expunged? Or is it unsettling, because it calls to mind a dreadful spectacle too heartily enjoyed? Such questions elude the historian.

Novelist Mallet-Joris, however, seems imaginatively sure of the answers. She is a Belgian educated at Bryn Mawr. It is not frivolous to say that she learned the feel of the late 16th and early 17th centuries by writing these novels, and that she wrote them in order to learn. Ordinary historical research, the reading of the documents, was only a beginning; the more important part of her learning, it is clear, came as her characters took form and motion. What clay and what fire make a witch? Write a novel, watch, and find out. The method works if the author has a genius for empathy and historic imagination.

The three witches are historical figures: Anne de Chantraine, a peddler's moony daughter, is burned at 17 in Liège; Charles Poirot, a physician who falls in love with a monstrously pious lady invalid and is burned after she retreats from him into hysteria and screams that he has possessed her; Jeanne Harvilliers, a gypsy's granddaughter filled with loathing for the lead-souled villagers who come to her for love charms and poisons. The book's flat prose is curiously eloquent. "She was on the side of the executioners," the account says of a young girl, "as children always are." The author knows what the town square of Liège smelted like; she can read the minds of judges three centuries dead. Witchcraft lives, and so does the novel.