The original Madeline, I think you could say was my mom. When she was two and a half years old, her dad, my grandfather, took her on a trip to Paris and he made this wonderful scrapbook for her called, “Your First Voyage to France” and we still have it and it has these photographs of her in the classic hat and the coat and in front of the Eiffel Tower.
And visiting the zoo and after that, they went to an island in the Mediterranean called the (Unint.) and there on this island, very small island, there’s only one motorized vehicle. And to get around my grandfather rented a bicycle and he promptly got run over by the only motorized vehicle, which luckily was an ambulance.
And it took him directly to the hospital and there on the ceiling was a crack that looked like a rabbit and in the room next door was a little girl who had just her appendix out and she jumped up on the bed and lifted her shirt to show him. And when he got home to New York, he sat down at his favorite restaurant and turned over the menu and started writing the story.
