I refer, of course, to the beginning of Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep by Ludwig Bemelmans. Today, Sieur Bemelmans is remembered chiefly as the creator of that most Parisian of all children, Madeline, but in his time, he was also the author of many adult novels, travelogues, and other non-fiction, all of which showed him to be a man of culture, wit, and melancholy disposition--in other words, exactly my literary type!
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep tells the story of the aristocratic lay-about General Leonidas Erosas, who finds his luxuriously sleepy lifestyle in the South of France suddenly interrupted by a bunch of tiresome bureaucrats--the Nazis. General Estes decides to return to his estates in South America. Accompanied by his suicidal English governess, his illiterate Indian manservant, his valet, his doctor, his cook, his beautiful Spanish mistress, a scrapbook of menus, sixteen carpets, his portrait, several boxes of cigars, six jars of pate, and three Great Danes, the General sets off...but 1942 is not a good year for travel...
Chapter 1: Biarritz
In the days when the King of Spain's only concern was that no one should clip a second off his record run from San Sebastian to Biarritz...
Amidst the boom-tara of unending fiestas, of gala dinners in blossom-lined ballrooms in which a thousand songbirds were released, half of them to be swept out the next day...
In the good old days when the amateur mechanic, the Marques Ricardo Soreano, amused himself himself by pushing a button under his table that ingeniously released a menagerie of tigers, lions, and crocodiles, which suddenly stared into the dining room through the large plate glass windows and frightened his guests to death...
When the young and radiant Natasha Brailovski shot herself through the heart over her father's grave with a ridiculously small jeweled revolver that was practically made by Cartier...
...and the handsome, immaculately groomed Antonio de Portago, dream man of the American debutantes, married, had all his debts paid, and later died for Franco...
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.
Ludwig Bemelmans
New York: Viking Press, 1942.
If you only know Sieur Bemelmans via Madeline, I urge you to check out his other fiction; he's a master at characterization, and his books very much capture the frantic sadness of the years between the Great War and the World War, and the rich aristos that were about to find themselves as out-dated as the dodo, refugees of a flood they contributed to but could not control. There's a bit of a faery-tale quality to Sieur Bemelman's novels, despite that they are set in our own world. His characters live in a sort of faeryland dreamland, and when they are forced to confront the decidedly unfaeryland-like real world--they are bewildered and lost--but their very obliviousness allows them to survive. Poor Prince von Bismarck reminds me very much of a character in a Bemelman novel...
If you live in New York City (or just visit) and haven't been to the Bemelmans Bar at the Hotel Carlyle, you must do so ASAP. An Art-Deco treasure, the bar features a mural by Sieur Bemelmans, and fantastic cocktails . Its one of the few places in New York you can get a proper Pisco Sour, which makes sense as the bar has been presided over by the same gentleman since the Truman Administration.
Ludwig Bemelmans
New York: Viking Press, 1942.
If you only know Sieur Bemelmans via Madeline, I urge you to check out his other fiction; he's a master at characterization, and his books very much capture the frantic sadness of the years between the Great War and the World War, and the rich aristos that were about to find themselves as out-dated as the dodo, refugees of a flood they contributed to but could not control. There's a bit of a faery-tale quality to Sieur Bemelman's novels, despite that they are set in our own world. His characters live in a sort of faeryland dreamland, and when they are forced to confront the decidedly unfaeryland-like real world--they are bewildered and lost--but their very obliviousness allows them to survive. Poor Prince von Bismarck reminds me very much of a character in a Bemelman novel...
If you live in New York City (or just visit) and haven't been to the Bemelmans Bar at the Hotel Carlyle, you must do so ASAP. An Art-Deco treasure, the bar features a mural by Sieur Bemelmans, and fantastic cocktails . Its one of the few places in New York you can get a proper Pisco Sour, which makes sense as the bar has been presided over by the same gentleman since the Truman Administration.
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