How Ludwig Bemelmans created Madeline
Since 1939, tales about the little red-haired schoolgirl have been a cosmopolitan cultural touchstone
Ludwig Bemelmans grew up hearing stories about a young girl who attended a boarding school where the students “slept in little beds that stood in two rows” and “went walking in two straight lines.”
That young girl was his mother, Franciska. Today we might recognize her in Madeline, the smallest of the French schoolgirls in colourful little dresses and bows.
Since the publication of Bemelmans’ first book, in 1939, the Madeline series has become a cosmopolitan cultural touchstone, the first step on the path to bona fide Francophilia for those who have never visited France. The series resonated with decades of American families, including the Kennedys: Jacqueline and Bemelmans were discussing the possibility of collaborating on a book shortly before he died in 1962.
April 27 would have been the author’s 120th birthday. While his character Madeline’s story is charted in 12 books and continues to delight a generation of children (and their parents), his personal history is less well known.
Bemelmans’ father, an Austrian hotelier named Lampert, left his mother and his governess, Gazelle, when they were both pregnant with his children, for another woman. Gazelle later committed suicide, leaving Franciska, 24, to take care of her son for the first time.
She told him stories of her own childhood, spent in a convent school that her son reimagined as an “old house in Paris that was covered in vines.”
He was always in trouble, and when he reached adolescence, his mother sent him to work for his Uncle Hans in a series of hotels, including one where he said he had a fateful encounter.
“The head waiter at that hotel was a really vicious man, and I was completely in his charge,” Bemelmans told The New York Times in 1941. “He wanted to beat me with a heavy leather whip, and I told him that if he hit me I would shoot him. He hit me, and I shot him in the abdomen. For some time it seemed he would die. He didn’t. But the police advised my family that I must be sent either to a reform school or America.”
Bemelmans arrived in America on Christmas Eve 1914 expecting to be reunited with his father, according to “Bemelmans: The Life and Art of Madeline’s Creator,” a book by his grandson John Bemelmans Marciano.
But Lampert “forgot to pick him up,” Marciano wrote, “and he was forced to spend his first Christmas in America on Ellis Island.”
He found his way into the hotel industry and, while working at the Ritz-Carlton, began to write and draw extensively. By the early 1930s, he had begun to place illustrations in The Saturday Evening Post. And in 1934, newly married to his wife, Freund, known as Mimi, he published his first children’s book, “Hansi” (with the help of May Massee, a children’s book editor at the Viking Press). Several more children’s books followed, along with stories published in The New Yorker and Vogue.
Bemelmans wrote many books, for children and for adults, that did not feature his famous heroine. They include “The Golden Basket,” “Quito Express,” “Fifi,” “Welcome Home,” “Small Beer,” “The Blue Danube,” “The Woman of My Life” and dozens of others.
“He was so prolific,” said Regina Hayes, editor-at-large at Viking, which publishes Bemelmans’ books. “He was an essayist, a novelist, wrote books about food, wrote and illustrated for The New Yorker and Holiday Magazine,” a travel journal.
It took the birth of his first and only child, Barbara, and a fortuitous trip to France, for the book that made him famous to materialize. In 1938, the young family travelled to the southern part of the country. In the midst of the trip, Bemelmans was sent to the hospital because of a bike crash, where in an adjoining room was a girl who was recovering from an appendectomy.
Madeline, who has a bout of appendicitis in the first book, came together soon after. “He would later say that his creation was a combination of his mother, wife and daughter,” Marciano writes. “But certainly it was also part Bemelmans himself — the smallest in class, the one always in trouble.”
The book was published in 1939, set in a Europe that was already at war. The following year, Germany invaded France. He continued to add titles to the Madeline series, as did his grandson, but Bemelmans never set another children’s book in Europe. The others took place in America.
Still, his paintings of Paris remain definitive for readers who have yet to see the city themselves.
“For many people, it is their first vision of Paris,” Hayes said. “The first time I went to Paris I was like, ‘Oh, this is right out of ‘Madeline.’”