"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...