At a second-hand book sale, I paid four dollars for a tall hard-bound book by Ludwig Bemelmans, the author of the Madeline stories, called The Best of Times (Simon and Schuster). It consists of illustrated articles that Bemelmans wrote for American magazines about his travels through Europe in 1946, to prove that adventurous tourists could still have a good time on a continent damaged by war, collaboration and the Holocaust. He attends a private dinner at a high-class Parisian brothel about to be closed by moral reformers. He learns the etiquette of dining in grey- and black-market restaurants, and explains how to live on nothing in Switzerland by exploiting the gap between the official exchange and the street rates. He documents the dowdy elegance of the Orient Express, visits tidy Alpine resorts and describes the Tyrolean love for women with sturdy, rounded Wadln (calf muscles). His good humour fades in Munich, where many buildings he knew as a boy are rubble. “I stood there experiencing this awful disaster as if it still were in flames,” he writes. A boy interrupts his shocked reverie to beg for his cigar-end. At Dachau, now filled with SS personnel awaiting trial, Bemelmans sketches pickled body parts torn from prisoners, and finds a room “solidly bloodstained up to the height of five feet.” He visits old German friends who confess their sense of collective guilt. “Their eyes fill with tears because they think also of the past and bring out this or that happy memory—and then they sit still as you are about to go—a blank stare comes into their eyes, and it is as if you had visited a person once dear to you who is now in an asylum and no longer recognizes you and is no longer the person you knew.”