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When Barbara was two, we spent the summer on the Île d'Yeu, which lies in the Bay of
Biscay, off the west coast of France. I have forgotten why we decided to go there. Most probably
somebody told us about it. The Île d'Yeu is immediately beautiful and at once familiar. Its round, small harbor is stuffed with boats; the big tuna schooners lie in the center; around them are sleek sardine and lobster boats. One can walk around in the harbor over the decks of boats. Only between bows and sterns shine triangles of green water. Twice a day there is a creaking of hulls and a tilting of masts; all the boats begin to settle, to lean to their neighbors; the tide, all the water, runs out of the harbor, and the bottom is dry. The first house you come to is a small poem of a hotel. It has a bridal suite with a pompom-curtained bed, a chaste washstand, pale pink wallpaper with white pigeons flying over it, and three fauteuils, tangerine velvet and every one large enough for two, closely held, to sit together. The five-foot proprietor rubs his hands, hops about, glares at employees, smiles at guests. Madame sits behind an ornate desk in the dining-room, her eyes everywhere. The kitchen is bright and smells of good butter, the linen is white, the silver gleams, the waiter is spotless. Outside, under and awning, behind a hedge of well-watered yew trees, overlooking the harbor, are the apéeritif tables and chairs. The prospectus status besides that the hotel has "eau chaude et froide, chauffage central, tout comfort moderne" -- all this is of no consequence, because you can never get a room there. The hotel has but twenty-six rooms, and these are reserved, year after year, by the same people, French families. Further down is the Hôtel des Voyageurs, sixty rooms, the same thing, the bridal suite in green, the prices somewhat more moderate, the Walking down the Quai Sadi-Carnot, you turn right and go through the rue de la Sardine. This street is beautifully named; the houses on both sides touch your shoulders and only a man with one short leg can walk through it in comfort, as half the street is taken up by sidewalk. At the end of the Street of the Sardine is the Island's store, the Nouvelles Galeries Insulaires. Its owner Monsieur Penaud will find a place for you to live. Île d'Yeu should really be Île de dieu, Monsieur Penaud explained, "d'Yeu" being the ancient and faulty way the Islanders spelled "of God." He established us in a fisherman's house, at the holiest address in this world, namely: No.3, rue du Paradis, Saint-Sauveur, Île d'Yeu. Our house was a sage, white, well-designed building. Through every door and window of it smiled the marine charm of the Island. The sea was no more than sixty yards from our door. Across the street was an eleventh-century church, whose steeple was build in the shape of a lighthouse. Over the house a brace of gulls hung in the air; there was the murmur of the sea; an old rowboat, with a sailor painted on its keel, stood up in the corner of the garden and served as a chicken coop. The vegetables in the garden, the fruits on the trees, and the chicken eggs went with the house; included also was a bicycle, trademarked "Hirondelle." It is a nice thing to take over a household so living, complete, and warm, and dig up radishes that someone else has planted for you and cut flowers a garden that someone else has tended. The coast of the Island is a succession of small, private beaches, each one like a room, its walls three curtains of rock and greenery. There is a cave to dress in. Once you arrive, it is yours. On the open side is the water, little waves, fine sand; and out on the green ocean all daylong the sardine fleet crosses back and forth with colored sails leaning over the water. There seem to be only three kinds of people: sailors, their hundred-times patched sensible pants and blouses in every shade of color; children; and everywhere two little bend old women dressed in black, their sharp profiles hooked together in gossip. Like crows in a tree they are, and, rightly enough, called "vieux corbeaux." Posing everywhere are fish and the things related to them. The sardine is the banana of their d'Yeu: you slip and fall on it. It looks out of the small market baskets that the vieux corbeaux carry home; its tail sticks out of fishermen's pockets; it is dragged by in boxes and barrels. Other fish, the tuna predominating, wander by on the shoulders of strong sailors, tied to bicycles, pushed by pairs of boys in carts. On day I bought four lobsters and rode back to the rue du Paradis and almost ran into Paradise itself. Pedaling along with the sack over my shoulder, both hands in my pockets and tracing fancy curves in the roadbed, I came to a bend, which is hidden by some dozen pine trees. Around this turn raced the Island's only automobile, a four horsepower Super-Rosengart, belonging to the baker of Saint-Sauveur. This car is a fragrant, flour-covered breadbasket on wheels; it threw me in a wide curve off the bicycle into a bramble bush. I took the car's doorhandle off with my elbow. I asked the baker to take me to the hospital in Saint-Saveur, but he said that, according to French law, a car must remain exactly where it was when the accident occurred, so that the gendarmes could make their proper deductions and see who was on the wrong side of the road. I tried to change his mind but he said, "Permit me, alors, monsieur, if you use words like that, then it is of no use at all to go on with this conversation. Having spoken, he went on to pick up his pain de ménage and some croissants that tere scattered on the road, and then spread aside the branches of the thicket to look for the doorhandle of his Super-Rosengart. I took my lobsters and went to the hospital on foot. A doctor came, with a cigarette stub hanging from his lower lip. With a blunt needle he wobbled into my arm. "Excusez-moi," he said, mais votre peau est dure!" I was put into a small white carbolicky bed. In the next room was a little girl who had her appendix out, and on the ceiling over my bed was a crack that, in the varying light of the morning, noon, and evening, looked like a rabbit, like the profile of Léon Blum, and at last, in conformity with the Island, like a tremendous sardine. I saw the nun bringing soup to the little girl. I remembered the stories my mother had told me of life in the convent school at Altötting and the little girl, the hospital, the room, the crank on the bed, the nurse, the old doctor, who looked like Léon Blum, all fell into place. I thought about where Madeline and her friends should live and decided on Paris. I made the first sketches on a sidewalk table outside the Restaurant Voltaire on the quai of that same name. The first words of the text, "In an old house in Paris/that was covered with vines," were written on the back of a menu in Pete's Tavern on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Irving Place in New York. Madeline was first published in 1939. It took about ten years to think of the next one, which was Madeline's Rescue. One day, after that was finished and in print, I stood and looked down at the Saint opposite Notre Dame. Some little boys were pointing at something floating in the river. One of them shouted: "Ah, there comes the wooden leg of my grandfather." I looked at the object that was approaching and discovered that in my book I had the Seine flowing in the wrong direction. Ludwig Bemelmans |
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