FRANCE-NORD. VOLUME I. ARTOIS. ESTRÉE-BLANCHE. LA REGION D'AIRE ET AU-DELA. HISTOIRE. HABITANTS. HISTOIRES.

By FrancoisDenoeu (Professor of French, Emeritus).Aire-sur-la-Lys (France): Librairie Mordacq, 1971. 370 pp. Illustrated. $7.95.On sale at Dartmouth Book Store, Hanover.

Dependable and solid, rooted in his office even at odd hours, Professor Denoeu was nonetheless mercurial. In classrooms he engaged even the most inarticulate students. Uninhibited and exacting, he elicited responses from men with no ear ridding themselves of American nasality, catching the flow of French phrases, and articulating with fingers, hands, shoulders, and even eyebrows. Always prompt and prepared, " Teacher shamed the lazybones. So they too studied the next lesson. His intensity was dynamic, even demonic. As linguistic orchestral conductor with less than musical delicacy, he pounded the desk. The class would chant out until perfected the word, phrase, and sentence. No man so shortsighted had ever so long-sighted a gaze. Sleepyheads woke up. Dreamers were shocked into action. All was light and motion.

Professor Denoeu could easily have rested on his classroom laurels. An instructor genuinely Gallic, he was conscious of Anglo- Saxon virtues needing to be harmoniously Frenchified. But he found time to write and publish no fewer than four novels, three volumes of plays and poetry, and 16 books of instruction. In spare time he lectured, free of charge, to college and town audiences about French architecture, poetry, and painting. In other carefree hours during 30 years he has worked on his great-in-size and great-in-potential French-American American-French dictionary so far unpublished though wordily needed in every American library and home. Why? Because English-French dictionaries are so jolly English in idiom and definition.

The spare time is not yet exhausted. For countless hours he has been engaged in research in Northern French history. His first volume centers on war-ravaged Artois and his native village of Estree-Blanche and ranges from pre-Christian days to the present. Skilfully he introduces names of celebrated visitors (Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Henry V and Henry VIII of England, Bayard, Francis I, Louis XIV, Marlborough, the Napoleons, Pétain, the Prince of Wales, and de Gaulle); alludes to hundreds of natives philoprogenitive to a virtue; and manipulates thousands of facts.

Non-Dartmouth historians may concentrate on wars: Guinegate I (on the field of battle more polished steel than earth, English archers kissed the soil and cried "Saint George and Burgundy" as they crossed themselves); Guinegate II (Henry VIII with 13,000 men and 29 pages, among them a young English mistress in boy's clothes, versus Bayard, "bon chevalier sans peur et sans reproche," captured at Estrée); the Revolution (1789-1792); The War of 1870-71; and the First and Second World Wars.

Dartmouth men and women may prefer the peaceful village of Denoeu family life with brooks and mill race, farmers and blacksmiths, ploughs and carriages, all made vivid by 60 illustrations. Delightful are pen portraits and anecdotes, 1900 to 1970, from street to street and house to house.

The old world impinged on the new when Madame Denoeu, transplanted, wept but grew to love so much Anglo-Saxon amenities she persuaded her husband to remain in Hanover. The new world impinged on the old in 1965 when François revisited his native Estrée with his wife Suzanne, daughter Ginette and her American husband Bill Willis, daughter Monique and her American husband John Cone, and grandchildren, a party of nine. The gravedigger emerged, Hamlet like, from Denoeu tombs to embrace François whose heart was full.

In his book the man from Estrée-Blanche has so warmed cold facts and brought to life dead friends, the tragic wars, and the bucolic gaieties of his village that one is tempted to amend Charles Lamb: "All, all are HERE, the old familiar faces."