Babette

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.'</p><p>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 <I>atelier</I> 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.<br>--Gerald Asher</p>