ALL THIS, AND HEAVEN TOO—Rachel Field—Macmillan ($2.50).
When her subject is right, as it was in Time Out of Mind and Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, Rachel Field can do it up brown. Her robust whimsicality, freshness and charm rank her, without disparagement, as the Louisa May Alcott of contemporary writers. All this, and Heaven too, the "true" story of her great-aunt, Henriette Desportes Field, is a Rachel Field natural.
Henriette was the notorious governess, "Mademoiselle D," who in 1847 was one of the central figures in the internationally famous murder trial, in Paris, of the Duc de Praslin, who was accused of the hatchet-murder of his voluptuous wife. (Because he committed suicide when arrested, the Praslin case is included among famous unsolved murders.)
In a brilliant self-defense before a hostile court, Henriette won acquittal, went to the U.S., taught in a fashionable girls' school in Manhattan. She married Henry Field, a preacher-writer ten years her junior, and for two decades, until her death in 1875, reigned as a famous hostess in a Gramercy Park salon frequented by William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Morse, Fanny Kemble.
Rachel Field's fictionized biography centres on Henriette's six years in the Praslin household, emphasizes her genius with children, her unimpeachable tact in dealing with her violently jealous mistress, her innocence of the scandals that linked her name with the handsome Duc, the injustice of contemporaries (among them Victor Hugo) who characterized her as "a rare woman...at once wicked and charming."
The dramatic interest of the last 160 pages, concerned with Henriette's life in the U.S., falls off sharply. But they make an interesting contribution to Americana, and Henriette's charming unconventionalities should please those who liked Margaret Armstrong's recent biography of Fanny Kemble.