PERHAPS no one is better fitted to recount the fantastic, brilliant history of the post-war decade in Paris than Maurice Sachs. As the grandson of Bizet, composer of "Carmen," the grandson of Georges Sachs, the great friend of Anatole France and Briand, and of the Madame Straus Proust immortalized as Madame Verdurin, he was brought up among literary people whose reputations were already established. And later, as the protege of Cocteau, Maritain, and Max Jacob, he knew all that world of genius and bohemianism, so strange in its contradictions and all comprehending unity.

The first part of the book, Monsieur Sachs has devoted to anecdotes and brief descriptions of the multitude of singular personalities that collected in the Paris of illusion and disillusion after the great war. There appear Erick Satle, that erratic genius of the piano, whose windows were so dirty "the sun never pierced their thick grey crust," and Paul Vallery, the poet, Andre Gide with his reserved, cruelly analytical "Nouvelle Revue Francaise," and Raymond Radeguet sitting every evening at the Boeuf surle Toit and drinking with-out moving his "stubborn eyelids." There is chirico, the Surrealist, and Maurice Rostand, who lived with his mother in haughty, respectable rooms looking out on the Arc de Triomphe de 1'Etoile, Matisse, Madame Chanel, Modigliani, and James Joyce, and Jose Maria Sert, who is now decoration part of Radio City. There are almost too many of them; one gains no very precise picture of any one, or of the whole; one is befuddled.

The second section deals with four "magicians": Cocteau, to whom the book is dedicated, Maritain, Max Jacob, and Picasso. Sachs' devotion to these men amounts virtually to hero-worship--although he would probably be horrified at the word. And yet for the most part he is able to give fair estimates of their achievements. On Picasso, of whom he knows the least, he goes furthest wrong. After saying that Picasso's genius is so great that anything he may produce cannot be without value, an absurd supposition in reference to anyone, he compares him to Leonardo, and lapses into further unqualified superlatives. His discussion of Cocteau, on the other hand, is brilliant, and gives a new light on his extraordinary personality and his influence on the present generation.

Maurice Sachs in his "Decade of Illusion" is very much a member of the school he describes. He is an individualist and an intellectual; something of a philosopher, a rationalist, while still an incurable romantic. At times he spoils his impression by unrestrained, uncritical enthusiasms; and he is throughout perhaps too trusting of his demi-gods. But the book pictures a phase of life, of bohemianism, that has never existed before and may never exist again with a certain brilliance and much understanding.