His parents are clearly extremely wealthy and he is, just as clearly, extremely lonely. In the third book, Pepito moves in next door. And there are toys from papa too (if not an actual papa). “In the middle of one night / Miss Clavel turned on her light / and said, ‘Something is not right!’” In the first book Madeline is rushed to hospital with appendicitis, which turns out, after the operation, to be quite a pleasant experience, because “outside were birds, trees, and sky – / and so ten days passed quickly by”. The middle of the night is when things often happen in these books, but signally, there are adults there to save children from harm. “In me a whole portion of it is missing – it is like a floor in a house where there is no furniture.” And, in another letter: “In the middle of the night, I often wake up – and stare at the open doors through which I cannot walk and at the closed ones that I can’t open – and the children’s books that keep me from blowing out my brains are created in this hour.” “I have forgotten so much of youth, and much of it was not experienced,” he once wrote to a friend. His father, who had already moved there, failed to meet him at Ellis Island when he arrived on Christmas Day 1914. He was given a choice between a reform school that trained German boys for the merchant marines, and America. He always felt like an outsider.”Īt 16, Bemelmans was apprenticed to an uncle in the Austrian hotel business, but this did not go well: one story goes that he shot at a waiter. “He didn’t speak any language without an accent,” his grandson once said, “I don’t know that he really had a first language.” And “He was the littlest kid in class. His mother, also pregnant, took him to Germany. He was cared for by a French governess, but she, pregnant with his father’s child, killed herself when he set up home with someone else. He was born in Meran, in what was then Austria-Hungary, in 1898, the son of a Belgian artist and a German brewer’s daughter who split up when he was six. But the settings of the books, and their undercurrents of sadness apparent to an adult reader, hint at less charmed things. He still considered himself an artist rather than a writer, despite his nearly 50 books, which included memoirs, travelogues, Hollywood scripts, and fiction for adults.īemelmans ended his life in New York, a successful artist and well-connected bon vivant. I did not know that Bemelmans, who drew all the pictures, showed in New York galleries and created New Yorker and Vogue covers, though the cosmopolitan sophistication, skill and lightness of touch in the illustrations in fact makes that no surprise. Energetic line drawings place the girls amongst all the great buildings of Paris – Sacre Coeur, the Place Vendome, Notre Dame – but she’s not French she’s apparently Texan. I thought the old house was an orphanage – it’s not, it’s a boarding school. She’s all of these things and a girl.Īs a child I had no real idea about the economic and parental arrangements – apart from the fact that there was an off-stage papa, no mother at all, and clearly enough cash to fly a horse between Paris and London (where, in Madeline in London, the girls go to visit Madeline’s sidekick-in-mischief Pepito, the son of the Spanish ambassador). She’s different from everyone else – but clearly in a good way. She knows what’s right, often in defiance of the grownups. She’s the one most inclined to create trouble and mischief – but also fun. Madeline is a great character: she’s the smallest, and she’s the bravest. And that, as well as the rhythm, is a huge part of the appeal of these books by Ludwig Bemelmans, which I not only read to my daughter, but give to friends who have daughters.
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