Babette

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As we quickly learn from Constance Crawford's perceptive and engaging memoir, it was in Babette's nature, in the genes and circumstances she inherited from both her mother and her father, to go against the grain of the high French bourgeoisie into which she was born. Once free to choose, she chose a far richer world of painters, writers, and musicians. 'We were not hippies, ' she says of the circle of impecunious friends she shared with her first husband, Paul Ullman, in Montparnasse, in the 1930s. 'We were Bohemians.' "The difference, of course, was--and is--style. Everything about Babette, including her generosity of spirit, her hospitality, and her gift for friendship, is infused with style. Sartre wrote: 'Life is nothing until it is lived.' And Babette has lived hers to the full, with courage, imagination, and elegance. By way of that modest Paris atelier followed by several gilded and cosseted years in New York and Connecticut, it has taken her from the band-stand and fishing boats of Sanary-sur-Mer to the virtually organic house in Portola Valley so familiar to her friends, so much a part of the texture of our own lives, that we all seem to live there, too. And, in a way, we do." --Gerald Asher