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Seigneur. * Uncle' Saltiel is the senior member and acknowledged leader of the * Valiant of France', so called on account of their attachment to the libertarian tradition of the Revolution of 1789 and to the florid, archaic language of the sixteenth century. United by friendship, they are constantly divided by their self-importance and bumbling incompetence. Saltiel, a failed inventor, is reduced to living by his wits: we first see him selling chestnuts on which he has inscribed verses from Deuteronomy. Naileater (so called because once, when a boy, 'he gobbled a dozen screws to assuage his inexorable hunger') is an engaging charlatan who displays endless ingenuity in devising hopeless money-making schemes, which range from setting up a university in his kitchen to a method for making shoes squeak properly so that everyone will know that they are new. Mattathias, the one-armed miser, keeps his own counsel and whatever money comes his way. Solomon, a little man with a big heart, is innocence on legs, the easily wounded conscience of the group. Michael, 'the giant', has a military bearing and a moustache which women find irresistible. The Valiant are physical, unreliable and tasteless; but they are also resilient, resourceful and endlessly optimistic: they are, in aword, everything which the popular imagination understands by Jewishness. In creating them, Cohen stands well outside the defensive tradition of much Jewish writing (from Zangwill to Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel) and makes no apology for the Valiant, who, for all their demented antics, represent good humour and sanity in a world which has forgotten how to live in joy. They, as much as the Law of Moses, are what Solal has denied.
    When Mangeclous opens, ten years or so have passed. By means which are not explained, Solal has once more achieved a position of power and influence: he is now Under-Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He sends money to the Valiant and invites them to visit him in Geneva. Suddenly rich and swollen with their own importance, they make a grand tour of Europe, leaving a trail of chaos in their wake. Their adventures are as extravagant as Baron Munchausen's, and their Chaplinesque spirit is unquenchable. They join forces with Scipion Escargassas, a Tartarin from Marseilles, and Jeremie, a Jew who has been a guest of Herr Hitler's prisons, both of whom succeed in obtaining an audience at the Palais des Nations by posing as an Argentinian delegation. Solal is both amused and appalled by their absurdity, because once more he has reached a point of crisis. His idealism, which he feels like a physical need, founders on his inability to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Intellectually he is convinced that the world must be saved through Reason and the Law of Nations. But his instinct tells him that its salvation lies in Faith and the Law of Moses. But Reason and Faith are irreconcilable, and his loyalties swing wildly between their immediate manifestations -the League and the Valiant. Solal is at war with himself and turns away from the world of international diplomacy and base, self-serving functionaries towards what seem to be the greater certainties of his Jewish "past. But while he never doubts the Law of Moses, he cannot believe in the God of his fathers. Moreover, he despises the fecklessness of the Valiant and the meekness of Jews like Jeremie, who will never inherit the earth however much they deserve to. He is no less aware that love of women is an eternal betrayal of love. Solal is a chemically pure idealist who lives in a comprehensively contaminating world.
    Some readers may classify Solal's inner contradictions as classically Oedipal: he cannot relate to his father, whom he rejects, and feels guilt for ignoring his mother and abandoning Adrienne, a mother substitute, who is driven to suicide. Whatever the merits of such a diagnosis, Solal is certainly more easily understood if we think of him as a compulsive personality