He dropped out of school and was fired from a hotel position back in Meran. Throughout his career as an illustrator, Bemelmans made joyful drawings that countered the uncontrollable.Īs he came of age, Bemelmans proved a poor student and a bad worker. Published during a period of international war, by an author whose own childhood had featured tumult and scandal, Madeline radiated peace and order. After spending ten days in the hospital, where she’s well-cared for and showered with gifts, the other girls are envious of her adventure. In Bemelmans’s story, the red-haired Madeline, the smallest girl in the house, must get her appendix removed. For the reader indoctrinated into the titular character’s alluring world, this language conjures Bemelmans’s charming drawings of the home itself: loose strings of ivy adorn a smooth white facade, while smoke issues from a cross-hatched chimney and a quaint lamp protrudes from the side. “In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines,” he wrote. Illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans secured his place in the annals of children’s literature with the opening lines to his 1939 masterpiece, Madeline.
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