The German artist Ludwig Bemelmans is nowadays best known for his beguiling children's books about the adventures of Madeleine.
But Bemelmans was a wonderful writer, as adept at sketching in prose as he was in illustration. His particular talent was for revealing the battier capers of the wealthy beau-monde into which he seems effortlessly to have fallen from the 1920s to the 1960s.
He is a charming guide to the eccentric, sometimes whimsical, often lonely, lives of the fashionable rich and their servants and
