Being ill in Paris is like being ill anywhere else — you spend a lot of time in bed, half-sleeping, half-thinking of all the work you’re not doing, waiting for your lazy immune system and the antibiotics to kick in. The only difference, as I recovered from bronchitis this past week, was that I found myself thinking of another young lady who lay in a bed in Paris and stared at the ceiling. I’m referring, of course, to Madeline, the subject of Ludwig Bemelmans’s famous book, one of my favorites as a child, one of my sons’ favorites a quarter-century ago, and still beloved today.
But for the first time, feverish and bored, I realized what a deeply strange book it is.
Many children’s books are strange, of course. I mean, seriously: Babar? And let’s not even get started with Curious George. But Madeline sports no talking animals, nor does it cavort playfully with colonialism. It’s the story of a little girl who has to go to the hospital to have her appendix out. What’s weird about it is announced — and immediately accepted by eager children — on the first couple of pages:
In an old house in Paris
That was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls
In two straight lines.
I don’t recall asking where Madeline’s family was. I can testify that my sons were curious about many aspects of the book, particularly the scene (when the girls “frowned at the bad”) with a cartoon robber and gendarme. But they didn’t ask about Madeline’s family, or those 11 other girls. They accepted Miss Clavel’s role without question. Perhaps it’s our immediate displacement — to Paris, to that vine-covered house — that makes the whole setup, even those martial lines, seem normal. Certainly the bouncy, slightly awkward rhyme and the bright illustrations quickly distract us from any suspicion that a dark, vine-covered house where girls perform their ablutions like robots might be a threatening place.
This week, though, I stumbled from my sickbed full of the questions that neither I nor my kids had ever asked: Who are these girls, why are they living together in this house, and who is Miss Clavel?
It turns out the place is a boarding school, not an orphanage, as you may have suspected already if you made it to the end, after Madeline’s appendectomy, when she receives “the dollhouse from Papa.” Bemelmans’s grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano, who has carried on his grandfather’s legacy with further Madeline books and also runs the website, claims that Madeline is not even French, but an American girl from the Fogg family. Then again, Marciano attests that Miss Clavel is a nurse, not a nun, which makes little sense in the circumstances, and in any case a nurse figure does appear in the book wearing a Flying Nun getup. More likely, Miss Clavel is the nun/teacher for these young children at a boarding school, with Madeline’s parents, or at least her father, very far away. Where did such a setting come from?
Bemelmans’s childhood, it turns out, was one of isolation and abandonment. “I have forgotten so much of youth, and much of it was not experienced,” he once wrote. “In me a whole portion of it is missing — it is like a floor in a house where there is no furniture.” For a time, he was sent to a boarding school in Rothenburg, where the boys walked through town in, of course, two straight lines, and Bemelmans was the smallest.
The actual spark for the original book took place when Bemelmans, as an adult, was struck by a baker’s delivery wagon and taken to the hospital:
I was put into a small, white, carbolicky bed, and it took a while for my arm to heal. Here were the stout sister that you see bringing the tray to Madeline, and the crank on the bed. In the room across the hall was a little girl who had had an appendix operation, and, standing up in the bed, with great pride she showed her scar to me. Over my bed was the crack in the ceiling “That had the habit, of sometimes looking like a rabbit.” It all began to arrange itself. And after I got back to Paris I started to paint the scenery for the book. I looked up telephone numbers to rhyme with appendix.
He didn’t do so well with that rhyme, among others, because he moved so much as a youngster that he had almost no first language and struggled with meter and rhyme. When I read the book aloud to my kids, I always ended up saying It’s an ap-pen-DIX to rhyme with the number Bemelmans came up with, Danton ten-ten-SIX. But as with Miss Clavel and the vine-covered house, my sons accepted this appendix event as part of the story; they were much more curious about that crack in the ceiling.
Madeline is fun and utterly charming, and it’s only as an adult living in an old house in Paris that I see the tinge of sadness behind its bright veil. What Papa is this, whose tiny daughter is rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, whose response is to send a dollhouse? Well, the book was first published in 1939. Compared with many other children in Europe that year and the years following, Madeline was lucky. Adults took care of her. Adults saved her. And she had her own feisty spirit.
“Good night, little girls. Thank the Lord you are well!
And now go to sleep!” said Miss Clavel.
And she turned out the light — and closed the door —
And that’s all there is –
There isn’t any more.