Burglars & Bougainvillea

I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU--Ludwig Bemelmans--Viking ($2.50).

"She came over and into my bed and leaned her ash-blonde head on my new framboise-colored $12.50 Saks Fifth Avenue pajamas, and then in the cadences of Leslie Howard, with her eyes on my lips, in three distinct shadings, soft, softer, and the last words in an almost inaudible whispered tone, she said, 'I love you, I love you, I will always love you. . . .' "

"My daughter Barbara," explains Author Bemelmans airily, in this latest funny travelogue. Barbara, aged three-and-a-half, is the intimate of "the captains of at least half a dozen liners," and "pen pal of some future desperado." Barbara has met nice people everywhere, "and left them nicely alone." Her heart belongs to Daddy and to a host of "socially maladjusted" bums and crooks she has picked up in Cuba, Paris, Gramercy Park, Chile, Peru, Ecuador.

In Paris, Barbara found Georges. Georges, a fascinating footpad, was so closely watched by the police that when he became Barbara's nursemaid she was "the best-guarded child in Paris." Away from Barbara, Georges made his living peddling heroin, stealing old masters, putting cotton in public telephones to prevent coins from being returned. Disguised as a Hindu, Georges once robbed a Swiss bank and a French newspaper, ran the story as reported by its "special envoy" at Basle:

"Yesterday afternoon there presented himself at the window ... a young man of exotic allure, his hair in a turban, his hands in bright lemon-yellow gloves, and speaking with a frightful English jargon. . . . " After some exchange of currency, the Hindu "left the bank with measured step. It was only in the evening, after the closing of the door, that our cashier, while verifying his cash, established, not without bitterness, that he lacked thirty-five bills of various denominations, which represented in total the coquette sum of 130,000 francs."

In these twelve half-autobiographical, half-fictional stories, illustrated by himself, Bemelmans checks out of the Hotel Splendide, setting of so many of his earlier stories, with its passionate waiters and soft carpets. But the same aroma follows him on this present tour of France, the Caribbean and South America. On the Normandie he meets the glamor girl who appeared to have "rubbed herself with a lotion every morning, and then pasted her clothes on her body"; the old Countess "with a face made of Roquefort" and an "asthmatic and dribbly" Pekingese with eyes "completely outside of his head." In Haiti he meets the elderly lady tourist ("white hair, white shoes, white shawl . . . like . . . the whitewashed front of the hotel") and her ravishing Irish maid, on whose head admiring Frenchmen coyly dropped bougainvillea blossoms. In Paris and Manhattan he meets the Polish photographer Zygmunt Pisik, whose German mistress changed his name to Johann von Schoenberg to start him off right. His French mistress pushed him right up the ladder by making him Henri de Beaumont. He became famous for his studies of nude ladies on bearskin rugs.

With or without Barbara, Author Bemelmans is equally at home refusing to buy shrunken human heads in Quito or placing a cigar butt under his nose and astonishing the inmates of a Berchtesgaden tavern with a raucous imitation of Hitler. His travels take the reader back to "the fat, dead days of tires and gasoline," to Author Bemelmans' own passionate search for a hobo with the colors of the Racquet Club on his hat band. "Give me a burglar," he cries, "or even a dismissed G-man, anything, but not the meek soul whose life is a monument to a million polished teapots."

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