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Notes: The making of Madeline, the working prototype for the now world-famous book and favorite of generations of children, inscribed to the little girl who inspired it and to her mother. On the front free endpapers there is a bold inscription: "To Peggy and Esme ? the original score for Madeline with love." Bemelmans dated it New York, November 1939 (the book was published in September 1939). Short on stature but big on moxie. According to a contemporary report in Life magazine, Madeline's origins go back to a summer's day in 1938 when Bemelmans was run down by the only automobile on the Ile D'yeu off France. In the hospital, he found himself neighbor to a young girl recuperating from an appendectomy. He was so impressed by the child's post-op cheerfulness that he decided to write a children's book in which the heroine should experience a similar adventure. A differing account as to the origins of the story comes from the family history of the consignor in which Bemelmans was recounted a cheerful tale of Esme's appendectomy that she had when she was six years old and living in Paris. At the time the prototype of the book was presented to her, Esme was in her late teens. Bemelmans, born in Europe of Belgian and German parents, came to the United States and joined the army in 1917 and in 1918 became an American citizen. In the twenties, he tried to become an artist and painter while working at hotels, but had substantial difficulties. His cartoon series "The Thrilling Adventures of the Count Bric a Brac" was dropped from the New York World after six months. In the early 1930s, he met May Massee, the children's book editor at Viking Press, and he began to publish a number of children's books beginning with Hansi in 1934. Ironically, Viking rejected Madeline (note that Bemelmans has written "Viking" as publisher on the spine of the mock-up), which was then published by Simon and Schuster. A number of changes that Bemelmans made were to enhance the backgrounds with a more distinctly Parisian air and to replace static scenes with livelier ones. On page 9 ("They smiled at the good") Bemelmans opts for the Garnier's ornate Opéra in the final version instead of the base of the Eiffel Tower in the lower corner of the original sketch. Page 14, which simply shows Madeline's boarding school uniform is changed in the final version to show a seamtress fitting Madeline. Page 18 depicts Madeline hanging upside down from a street lamp, resembling more a crucifixion than the pint-sized pipsqueak's happy-go-lucky and carefree antics. Bemelmans finally settled on having Madeline traipse across the wall of a bridge over the Seine. As Madeline is whisked off to hospital (page 26), Bemelmans added a Chagall-like collage of Parisian streetscapes and monuments in the final version. For page 11, he rejected the girls watching a funeral procession, and has them instead sympathizing with a wounded soldier with a broken leg in front of the Invalides. Two sketches that remained relatively unchanged were: Madeline pooh-poohing the ferocious tiger at the zoo while all the other girls cowered about Miss Clavel; the other sketch is of the famous "rabbit" crack in the ceiling of her hospital room, for which Bemelmans also drew an ink version at the end of the book. And even though Bemelmans had to change Madeleine to Madeline to work with his rhymes (much to the anguish of all little girls named Madeleine), he still misspelled the name two or three times in the course of his manuscript. Anna Quindlen aptly observed in her preface to the 1993 compendium of the Madeline stories: " ... [C]ertain books out of some grown-up's idea of children, of why they are and what they should be like ... and then there are the books that are written for real children by people who manage ... to maintain an utterly childlike part of their minds. ... Madeline charms because of rhyme and meter, vivid illustrations and engaging situtations. But the Madeline books endure because they understand children and epitomize what they fear, what they desire, and what they hope to be, in the person of one little girl. A risk taker. An adventurer. And at the end , a small child drifting off to sleep. 'That's all there is ? there isn't any more'" (Quindlen, Mad about Madeline, p. 11). Madeline belongs to that class of gutsy girl heroines like Anne Shirley of the Green Gables series and Jo March in Little Women whose pluck and intelligence challenged and conquered the standard expectations of female behavior.