Bubbles & Bemelmanship

THE WOMAN OF MY LIFE (218 pp.)--Ludwig Bemelmans--Viking ($3.50).

Once there was a poor little rich man. His name was Armand de Montfort-Lamoury, and he was a duke. Armand had everything: a Paris town house and a Daimler town car, pressed duck at the Tour d'Argent and Bellinger '47 to wash it down. Still, he lacked The Perfect Love.

The trouble with Armand was that his bold, naughty papa had marched him to a bordello as a teen-age boy to learn the facts of life, which so flustered the sensitive lad that he flunked the course. Papa had been the iron duke, so imperious that he threatened to have his manservant buried with him when he died, "at my feet, of course." By contrast, poor Armand is such an average Jean that chauffeurs, spotting him near the Daimler, ask him whom he drives for. Can this shy, sweet and sad duke ever find Miss Right? Out of this soapy dilemma, cosmopolitan, gourmettlesome Author Ludwig Bemelmans, 59, blows yet another bubble of sentimental whimsy, wry humor and worldly innocence.

To aid shy Armand in his romantic quest, some of his flunkies bait a tender trap. They transform one of his surplus chateaux into a luxury hotel, designate one room as the Chambre d'Amour, to be rented only to beautiful women under the pretext that the owner of the suite is out of town. Armand's role is to enter the Chambre d'Amour in the night, valise in hand, surprising the sleeping beauty and then gallantly offering to spend the night on the neighboring couch. This bedroom farce promptly nets Armand two discontented wives, whom he restores to their husbands, and a would-be suicide whose life he saves only to see her become another's wife.

Fed up with the room service, Armand decides to sell the hotel. But all is not lost, and in time he meets a trig, purposeful American girl named Evelyn. She takes over Armand's business affairs like a one-woman managerial revolution, but she also shows him what noisy music they can make together by staging a small riot in a restaurant and getting the duke thrown in jail. Since no one in his family has had this kind of fun since the French Revolution, Armand happily jettisons liberty, equality and fraternity for connubiality. U.S. girls are a trifle bossy and European men a shade flighty, but, shrugs Bemelmans, ever the twain shall mate.

While the characters sometimes perform with the bedlam logic of a Marx Brothers film, their creator is still the only master of Bemelmanship--the art of not blowing a shimmering literary soap bubble past its bursting point.

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