For the Lollipop Trade

MADELINE'S RESCUE (56 pp.)--Ludwig Bemelmans--Viking ($3).

In an old house in Paris That was covered with vines Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

As well-read moppets know, the smallest and bravest of the twelve little girls was Madeline. Ludwig Bemelmans' 1939 picture-and-verse classic told how Madeline came triumphantly through one of the most delightful appendectomies in literature. It also made his heroine's name a household word with a host of youngsters and their elders, who, having to read the thing aloud night after night, found grown-up delight in Bemelmans' warmly colored fantasies of Paris.

The good news for the lollipop trade: Madeline is back, with her eleven straight-living little boarding-school friends and the noble Schoolmistress Clavel, in a rousing sequel. In Madeline's Rescue, Bemelmans takes up where he left off when he noted earlier of Madeline: "And nobody knew so well / How to frighten Miss Clavel." One of the frightening things Madeline liked to do was walking on bridge railings. This time she falls into the Seine, and "Poor Madeline would now be dead / But for a dog / That kept its head."

The dog who pulls Madeline out of the Seine is happily named Genevieve, and Genevieve comes to live in Miss Clavel's vine-covered school. She gets lost, and Artist Bemelmans goes on a gaily painted search for her through Montmartre, the Tuileries, Saint Germain des Pres, and other Parisian quarters where colors abound. Genevieve is duly restored to hearthside, and there, in a less-abiding imagination, the story would have to end. But Bemelmans knows his moppets, deftly sets up a new problem: each little girl naturally wants Genevieve all for her own. There is trouble and scrapping aplenty, until Genevieve herself solves the problem to everybody's thorough satisfaction.

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