SEASON’S READINGS : Rich in France : Join <i> le beau monde</i> for the holidays

Warner LeRoy, the restauranteur, once sat down to a lavish meal at the Grand Vefour, the old favorite tucked away in a corner of the Palais Royale in Paris--superb food, great wine, the works. At the end of it, the headwaiter came over to inquire if it had been all right, and was there anything else he would like? “Yes,” LeRoy decided after a moment. “Bring it again.”

They did, and he ate it, establishing himself, if not as immortal, at least as someone to be reckoned with.

So it is with books about France. There’s a wealth of them, but if they’re good, can there be too many? No. Bring it again.

Do you remember the Deux Magots, where the poets argued--Rimbaud, Mallarme, Verlaine--and Simone de Beauvoir used to come to write? Of course. It’s a classic, the terraces outside, the chairs, sitting, reading, talking, looking. Or the Deux Garcons in Aix, which is almost as well known? Cezanne used to sit here, sometimes with his old school friend, Zola. French cafes are a special haven, many with an impressive artistic or intellectual history, or just as important, social or sexual, and in The French Cafe, which is beautiful if light and a bit gushy, there are many to choose from. Let us say it is a kind of appetizer.

Another book of photographs, of a different order, is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s A Propos de Paris, based on an exhibition at the Musee de Carnavalet in 1984. There are 131 photographs, taken over a 50-year period. Cartier-Bresson, who started out to be a painter, is the old master of European photography and a brother in spirit to the Jean Renoir of “Grand Illusion” and “Rules of the Game”--wise, utterly human. These are black-and-white images with a kind of sadness and affection, as well as Cartier-Bresson’s customary jewel-like clarity; one has the feeling they should not be allowed to lie unseen on the pages but should be cut out and pinned to the wall, as in an artist’s studio, to allow them to continually exert their power. The Paris they reveal in some way has vanished, but in another way it will never vanish, in part because of work like this.

There are three new books about Provence, the region, coast and uplands, from Nimes through Marseilles, Saint-Tropez and Cannes, to Nice and the Italian border: the south of France. It is difficult to think of any place more romantic, more beautiful, more celebrated. Colette, Jean Giono, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Somerset Maugham are among the many writers who have contributed to its fame, and among the many painters there are Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne. This is apart from gamblers, opera stars, royalty and the merely rich. A friend of mine in a wheelchair went to lunch at Eden Roc for the first time, white linen overlooking the blue of the sea, and came back to recount the movie stars he had seen. “But, my God, their women!” he said. “What women!”

All the dazzling photographs in Peter Mayle’s Provence are aerial, taken from a helicopter, and there are no women, apart from some figures on the beach a fraction of an inch high. In English and probably many other languages, Mayle has become the voice of Provence, and readers will recognize the light-hearted text as his own. There is a tantalizing if not great amount of detail; villages you may want to note, such as Pernes-les-Fontaines; restaurants he praises, such as La Feniere in Lourmarin (I see it has three forks and spoons in the Michelin); and recommended wines, such as Chateau de L’Isolette, which is a Cotes du Luberon.

A more intimate look at some of these same villages, as well as nearly 20 others, can be had in The Most Beautiful Villages of Provence, a kind of large-format guide which, like John Russell’s awe-inspiring Paris, you would like to take with you, if it weren’t too big to pack. There are places such as Gordes, perhaps the most perfect of all; Lacoste, the setting for de Sade’s “Justine” and “One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom”; Roussillon, where Samuel Beckett found refuge during World War II and also had a nervous breakdown; Eze, famous for Nietzsche’s residence there in the 1880s, hilltop towns with tile roofs and shaded squares, vineyards and olive groves. Though a bit on the pretty side, the book nevertheless addresses the practical, with names of hotels, restaurants, dates of festivals and open- air markets.

Gardens of the French Riviera is one of those books that is interesting precisely because of the intensity of its focus. Filled with photographs and exotic descriptions, it also has stories: the banker who created an Eden for his young wife and later, ruined at Monte Carlo, threw himself into the sea a la Norman Main. The names that pour forth! Les Cendres, Villa Thuret, La Fiorentina, as well as those of figures associated in one way or another with the Cote d’Azur: Cole Porter, Edith Wharton, Baroness Beatrice Ephrassi de Rothschild. Every sort of garden is included, from the vast and inimitable ones established in the last century by rich foreigners such as Thomas Hanbury or King Leopold II of Belgium, to smaller, terraced gardens; intimate gardens, gardens to be lived in.

Baroness de Rothschild named her 17 acres poised above the sea after a famous ocean liner, Villa Ile de France, and dressed her gardeners as French sailors. King Leopold loved flowers, but that was not all he cultivated; he linked his gardens to the property of a neighboring French girl by a bridge of greenery. It has been often said that, if you possess the wherewithal, you can be richer in France than anywhere on earth.

In the same vein of narrow subject that manages to cast a broad light is an exceptionally beautiful book called The Book of Fine Linen, with text that draws on sources as various as Flaubert, Homer, the Goncourt brothers and the infamous Abbe de Brantome, whose “Tales of Fair and Gallant Ladies” itself deserves as elegant a book. Linen--sheets, pillowcases coverlets, towels--was once, long before Porthault, a sign of wealth, as well as a symbol, stacked in chests or cupboards, of domestic comfort and order. The principal evocation, of course, is bed: “The lazy mornings that stretched on after long evenings of tenderness,” as Zola wrote, and there are glimpses of private life in ancient civilizations as well as Europe in the Middle Ages, when the entire household, servants included, slept naked together in the same very wide bed. The trousseau of 7-year-old Isabelle of France, when she was promised to Richard II of England in the 1390s, is listed as “14 pairs of sheets, 12 large cloths, 24 smaller cloths, several colored bedspreads in velvet and satin, and a few dolls.” In bourgeois families of the 18th and 19th centuries, trousseaux often contained more linen than would be necessary in a lifetime and were passed down at death to the children, half-unused.

“A center of order that protects the house from uncurbed disorder”--this is Gaston Bachelard’s description of an armoire with its neatly folded piles of linen, and although the true center of a household is probably now the VCR or swimming pool, it is debatable if our ideas of living have become more highly evolved.

Finally, encompassing more than France, though close to it in every way, is The Oxford Companion to Wine. With more than 3,000 entries and many illustrations, it announces itself as indispensable, if only to settle arguments. Everything conceivable is covered, including biographical sketches of significant individuals, one of them, properly, being Alexis Lichine, who wrote his own encyclopedia of wine, and whose book, “The Wines of France,” was the first I ever read on the subject and remains the basis of almost all I know. “The Oxford Companion” describes “The Wines of France” as “an excellent primer,” which pretty well takes care of my expertise.

I have drunk many wines, however, and if I am not able to discuss varieties of grape or organic acids convincingly, I think of an old, retired doctor I know, much-traveled in Europe with his wife as indefatigable guide. He likes to say he has seen every cathedral, museum, graveyard and painting in Europe. “I don’t remember them,” he says, “but I’ve seen them.”

“The Oxford Companion” is there to remedy that.

THE FRENCH CAFE, by Marie-France Boyer, photographs by Eric Morin (Thames & Hudson: $19.95; 112 pp.)

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO WINE, edited by Jancis Robinson (Oxford: $45; 1,040 pp.)

THE BOOK OF FINE LINEN, by Francoise de Bonneville (Flammarion: $45; 208 pp.)

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VILLAGES OF PROVENCE, (Norton: $45; 220 pp.)

GARDENS OF THE FRENCH RIVIERA, by Louisa Jones, photographs by Vincent Motte (Flammarion: $50; 212 pp.)

PROVENCE, by Peter Mayle (Random House: $39.95; 132 pp.)

A PROPOS DE PARIS, by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Bulfinch / Little, Brown: $49.95; 146 pp.)

And Keep In Mind:

THE CHRONICLE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC, by Alan Kendall (Thames & Hudson: $39.95; 229 pp.)

THE BULFINCH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANTIQUES, edited by Paul Atterbury and Lars Tharp (Bulfinch: $50; 332 pp.)

A COTE D’AZUR ALBUM, by Edward Quinn (Scalo: $29.95; 176 pp.)

THE VILLAS OF PLINY: From Antiquity to Posterity, by Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey (Chicago: $49.95; 377 pp.)