Guitry was a believer in the theory that history is made by night. Also by accident. This Guitry gem is a breathtaking feat of storytelling, leaping through centuries of European court life with seven identical pearls as a calling card. Four of the pearls now adorn the English crown, but as for the other three? Ah, that brings the tale into the present tense. Guitry would never miss his own show and he appears here as the storyteller/ detective, one Jean Martin, as well as in the roles of François I, Barras, and Napoleon III. Jacqueline Delubac, a veritable Claudette Colbert of the French screen (and one of Guitry's five wives), plays Mme. Martin, Mary Queen of Scots, and Josephine to Jean-Louis Barrault's Napoleon. The dialogue is deliriously funny in three languages-French, Italian and English (perhaps under François I's theory that in order to rule France, one must understand English). Oh, and a fourth-Abyssinian, which is merely backwards French spoken by Arletty as a snake-charming queen. (She is rivaled only by Mme. Martin, responding to a would-be suitor using only adverbs.) Historical characters mirror one another in their comic tics and pearls of patter, so that history, like the narrative, proceeds more triangularly than linearly.