L'Amour the Merrier

LOVE AND THE FRENCH (368 pp.)

Nina Epton—World ($5).

Whether or not the French deserve their frequently self-bestowed laurels as great lovers, few would deny that they are consummate kiss-and-tell artists. Over the centuries, they have told all in diaries, letters, memoirs, novels and the social chronicles of boudoir, salon and brothel. With one eye on the lofty mystery of love and the other hovering at the keyhole, British Author Nina Epton scans the Gallic love parade in an amusing though helter-skelter review.

Romantic love did not always exist, says Author Epton. It was invented by the troubadours, the hobohemian minstrel poets of the late Middle Ages. Medieval ladies spent half their time racing across the jousting fields with buckets of hot water, bathing and bandaging strange men. It remained for the troubadours to glamorize the knight-lady relationship and raise it to the level of a semimystical romantic cult. For all their platonic, fig-leafy sentiments, the troubadours themselves were a crudely carnal lot, and they gave romance in France a lasting split personality: love and marriage became contradictory terms.

What Is Suitable. Medieval marriage was more fearful than joyful. Titled gentlemen thought nothing of punching their wives in the face, and ladies were often disfigured for life with broken noses. Husbands were cruelly vindictive to errant wives. When the Dame de Fayel's husband discovered that she kept her dead lover's heart in a casket, he had it plucked out and served up in a stew. Though the clergy openly kept concubines till the 16th century, bodily love bore the taint of anathema. Sample bedgear for many a medieval wife was the chemise cagoule, "a heavy nightdress with a suitably placed hole through which the husband could impregnate his wife while avoiding any other contact."

Clothes, or the lack of them, naturally obsessed the fashion-conscious French amorists. During the 14th and 15th centuries, women wore disconcertingly low-necked dresses, lacing their breasts so high that "a candlestick could be placed upon them." Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, pioneered a bare-to-the-waist style at court and also stopped the show at the palace by affecting a kind of girl-in-the-Hathaway-patch masking of one breast. Brazenly posing as a Madonna, she managed to have this piquant fashion immortalized by Painter Jean Fouquet.

Panties or knickers were invented because of Henry II's wife, Catherine de Medici, whose shapely legs were all too visible riding sidesaddle on windy days. Ironically, conservative 16th century moralists resisted the innovation. "Women should . leave their buttocks uncovered under their skirts," they said. "They should not appropriate a masculine garment but leave their behinds nude as is suitable for their sex."

Order of Aphrodites. But from the moralist's point of view, the worst was to come. It was the era of the great royal mistresses (Maintenon, Pompadour, Du Barry) and of the monsters of sex (notably the Marquis de Sade). It.was also the Age of Enlightenment, and medical science was eagerly enlisted in the service of love. Late in Louis XIV's reign, a certain Dr. Venette soberly advised that dried Egyptian crocodile kidneys pounded into a powder and diluted in sweet wine made the perfect aphrodisiac.