They were just two little girls enjoying their first-ever unchaperoned trip to Europe. "I danced a gavotte/ I ate an eclair/ I looked for Lee/ But she wasn't there," wrote a lighthearted Jackie Bouvier, 22, while her kid sister Lee, 18, sent home an unblinking commentary on her experiences. Once she encountered an interested Lebanese on the Queen Elizabeth. "Jackie has warned me," wrote Lee, "about the quirks in the sex lives of Near Easterners!!" Then there was the proboscidate Persian who whirled Lee round the dance floor ("The only thing I could see in the whole room was his nose"), while Jackie waltzed with the sexy purser. And final indignity, at a Paris soiree Lee felt her underclothes slip to the floor under her long skirt even as she shook hands with an ambassador.

The sisters were so grateful to their kind mama and stepfather for the 14-week treat in 1951 that they pasted up a scrapbook of Jackie's curlicued drawings and rhymes and Lee's stories, which they entitled One Special Summer. "We are not the Bronte sisters," admits Lee in the foreword to the book, which has been discovered among family memorabilia and is being excerpted in the November Ladies' Home Journal. No, they are not. But their piercing candor made them memorable young tourists. Mischievous too. Jackie accompanied Lee to a singing lesson in Venice with one of Italy's foremost sopranos, then sat back and urged her sister to sing something from Call Me Madam. Lee now recalls that Jackie played a similar trick on her a decade later. During a 1963 trip to Morocco, while Lee and First Lady Jackie Kennedy were waiting with the King's harem to meet the monarch, Jackie boasted about her sister's lovely singing voice, then forced her to sing In an Old Dutch Garden. Ah, pre-Camelot revisited.

For a while it seemed as if Elizabeth Taylor were getting the diamond mine and Richard Burton the shaft. Now, apparently, the durable actor has rebounded from his recent divorce by acquiring a new Elizabeth--and royalty at that. Burton's latest love is Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, 38, a twice-married mother of three whose second husband is British Banker-Politician Neil Balfour. The romance began just last month while Burton was in London filming a biography of Sir Winston Churchill. "We are going to be married--that's definite," says Burton. "She has been a friend to Elizabeth [Taylor] and me for years. We re-met three weeks ago, and that was it." Besides her parents in Paris, Liz II has other royal connections; she is a second cousin to Prince Charles and Princess Anne of Britain. So far, inhabitants of Buckingham Palace have declined to comment on the prospect of a new inlaw.

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Can a young girl from eastern Pennsylvania find happiness in the arms of a Russian defector? Perhaps, if the girl is Ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, 21, and her partner is Mikhail Baryshnikov, 26, star performer with Leningrad's Kirov Ballet until his grand jete into the West last June. Between rehearsals for their U.S. debut as partners at the Kennedy Center in Washington this week, Baryshnikov has been learning English from U.S. television commercials, and Kirkland has been taking Russian lessons from Berlitz. "We get along very well," says Gelsey. "Occasionally Mischa gets extremely impatient, and then he has a solemn look on his face. But we never fight." Kirkland, too, is a defector of sorts, having left the New York City Ballet to team up with Baryshnikov at the American Ballet Theater. Is a new romance getting off the ground? "We like each other very much and we are very good friends," says Kirkland diplomatically. "That's all."

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