Madeline

Twelve little girls share an old vine-covered house in Paris, where they eat, sleep and walk in two straight lines under the eye of Miss Clavel. The smallest, Madeline, is also the boldest. Mice and tigers do not frighten her.

One night Miss Clavel wakes with a sense that something is wrong and finds Madeline crying. Doctor Cohn is called, and Madeline is rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix. She has an operation.

Recovery brings visitors. Miss Clavel and the eleven other girls come with flowers, and Madeline shows them the dollhouse her Papa sent. When the girls return home, they find they envy her scar and her gifts, and each of them wants her own appendix out.

The book is a picture book written in rhyming verse, with loose, airy drawings of Paris that Ludwig Bemelmans made himself. It first appeared in 1939, won a Caldecott Honor in 1940, and began a long series of Madeline stories. The tone stays light and brisk, even through the emergency.