>Seeing Mme. Clavel escorting twelve little girls in two straight lines
>seems more likely, but still not something I'd bet on.

This reminded me that it's been a long time since I read Hotel Bemelmans, Madeline creator Ludwig Bemelmans's memoir of his time working in grand hotels as a boy and young man, which is simultaneously a hoot and kind of horrifying, because boy howdy, the hospitality industry was not the place to be in the early 20th century. (Probably still isn't today, either, but back then, even less so.)

Later in life, Bemelmans claimed in an interview that he came to the US in 1914, aged sixteen, because when he was an apprentice in a hotel in Austria, he was routinely whipped by the headwaiter, and when he warned the man that if it happened again he'd shoot him, it happened again, so he shot him. Later biographers of Bemelmans, including his own son, allowed as how this was probably a tall tale, but I wish to believe that it's true. Some part of me loves the idea that a future well-loved children's illustrator came to the United States as a boy because he was on the lam after shooting his boss.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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