Chiefly Gossip

Chiefly Gossip Lupescu, by Alice-Leone Moats, 220 – pp. New York: Henry Holt and — Company. $3.50 This volume will enable a sufficiently credulous reader to speak with auth- ority about everything from the late King Carol’s performance in bed to the political corruption which, we are told, so weakened Rumania that she was unable to resist the combined forces of Germany and Russia in 1940, Some of the gossip collected in these pages may well be true, but the author writes of the King and the King’s mistress with ill-concealed animosity, holds the provincial notion that monarchy is just a “stupendous hoax,” and shows no awareness of the deep-rooted and almost feudal Ru- manian culture that I have seen ably portrayed in the yet unpublished memoirs of the Princess Cantacuzene. R.P.O,