French Without Tears

THE LITTLE MADELEINE (350 pp.) -- Mrs. Robert Henrey -- Dutton ($4).

French-born Madeleine Henrey, a highly intelligent woman, must have realized the risk she was running in writing the story of her childhood. All she had to work with were the short and simple annals of the poor. Yet The Little Madeleine is a triumph over the facts of life, a moving story of considerable charm and readability that is all the more remarkable be cause it is not about anything or anybody of seeming importance. What raises this artfully simple book above the commonplace is Author Henrey's deep respect for life itself, anybody's life.

Madeleine was born in 1906 in the shad ow of Montmartre's Sacre-Coeur. The cards were pretty well stacked against her. Father was an ex-coal miner from the provinces who had come to Paris full of self-assurance and wound up as an ill-paid laborer. Mother was a seamstress, a slim country redhead with a profound conviction that life would not hold much for her.

Outwardly, little Madeleine's life was a succession of sleazy flats in the slummier parts of Paris, poor food, illness, and an environment in which bawds and criminal riffraff were taken for granted. Her father died a pauper, and for several days, while her mother tried to raise money for a funeral, the body lay in their tiny, one-room-and-kitchen flat. Madeleine's mother wor ried about the effect on the child, but a worldly neighbor snapped: "Let her be! . . . Hide nothing from your little Madeleine, and if later her luck changes, she'll know something about both worlds."

Once in a while Madeleine's luck did change. There was a fine interlude when she stayed with country relatives. Another time she and her mother went to live in a provincial town, inadvertently moved into a brothel. Her luck changed for good when, with mamma, she left Paris for London, became a hairdresser at the Savoy Hotel while mother did dressmaking. Today little Madeleine is Mrs. Robert Henrey, au thor of several well-written books, mother of gifted Child Actor Bobby Henrey (The Fallen Idol). Her saga of life & death in Paris is an endearing, peculiarly feminine mixture of gentleness and Gallic realism, a reminder that life has its quota of sentiment and that it can be conveyed without sentimentality.

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