I have lost a close friend, our party one of its best members and France one of the greatest poets of the century.' A Private and Public Man He was a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party and yesterday the party's leader, Georges Marchais, said: 'I can't find words to express the immense pain that grips me. Louis Aragon was not only an 'homme des lettres,' in the French phrase, but an 'homme engage,' a man deeply committed to and involved in his times. I bow before his memory.' Just last year, President Mitterrand made Mr.

'The magic of his poetry and the force of his work put him in the first rank of our national literature. 'France is grief-stricken by the death of one of its greatest writers,' said President Francois Mitterrand. A score of novels, hundreds of poems and thousands of critical articles flowed form his pen over more than half a century. Novelist, poet and essayist, Dadaist, Surrealist and Marxist, battlefield hero in two World Wars and active in the Resistance, intellectual and friend of Picasso and Matisse, Louis Aragon was among France's foremost men of letters in this century.

The scholarship, the high calibre of reporting, the workmanship for many readers might have been sacrificed for a rousing, tight, well-paced story.Louis Aragon, the French poet and Communist Party luminary, died yesterday at his home in Paris. Readers interested in military minutiae will find it detailed to the last item of dress. The period comes to life by the sheer weight of detail, but that very fact prohibits the dramatic flow. Each day of the Holy Week in handled in depth and many sections of the book read like a newspaper's account of the day's incidents. Should he follow his king into exile defect- as many were doing- to the cause of Napoleon or seek a third way out? His is not the only action traced. Theodore is a man of sensibility, an artist and a thinker who is troubled by the choice thrust upon him.

The central character is young Theodore Gericault, a Musketeer in the Royal Guards. There is little of what we call ''plot'' the book rotates somewhat ponderously around a situation:- the flight of Louis XVIII and the preparations to meet the return of Napoleon from Elba, the period known as the famous 100 days. Most of the names mentioned are of people who actually lived - and unfortunately the mere listing makes for a confused welter which clogs the narrative action. Rather it is a fictionalized study of the movements of various segments of French society and their reactions to the crucial turn of events. Although the book is called a ''novel'' it is barely that.

A mammoth work by one of France's most respected poets is a detailed account of the week preceding Napoieon's return to power in 1815.

Holy Week by Louis Aragon