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March 2014 | I M P E R I A L № 03
How I spotted an elephant
namely from L’Illustration des modes (fr. Fashion Illustrated, Ed.), which back in the day was far more popular than contemporary Vogue. The little elephant was released in hard cover. If only they had know what they were doing — the family has been working for Babar ever since. The first book The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant is the most touching. I saw the original leaves prepared for publishing at the Museum of Decorative Arts, and there also — Babar’s famous green suit, created for the first theatre production of the famous elephant’s adventures. He actually was quite a dandy, a real star of illustrated magazines. Having escaped from the savage hunter to the city, where he met the Old Lady, the cultured elephant first visits Galeries Lafayette, where he buys himself:
A story about how one family got a very fancy animal and a love affair began which is still going strong almost a century later.
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A l e k s e y Ta r k h a n o v , к o m m e r s a n t Translation
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or many years, as my children grew up and learned French, I diligently brought them picture books from Paris. Obviously, I picked them according to my taste and primarily for myself. I love children’s books. Only children’s literature can be truly popular. If it is good, it is read by everyone and at different times: parents read it to their children, then grandparents to their grandchildren. In this sense Korney Chukovsky is far more famous than Leo Tolstoy. In France Victor Hugo and Emile Zola’s characters gave way to Babar the Elephant. I read stories about him to my son and daughter. “In the great
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Shamil Garaev “A shirt and a necktie, A suit of pleasant green color, A beautiful bowler hat and shoes with spats” — and thus acquires his unique identity for many books to come. forest a little elephant was born, his name was Babar, — the French have known the beginning of the story by heart for the last 80 years, just as we know “An old man has three sons” from the Humpbacked Horse. Babar’s story, which started in the 1930s, is as wellknown in France as the adventures of the three musketeers. It has existed for several generations now. In the book Babar loses his mother, who is killed by a cruel hunter. In real life Babar’s parents were the illustrator Jean de Brunhoff and his wife Cecile Sabouraud. They lived in Chessy near Paris where years later Disneyland was built. They had two boys, Mathieu and
Laurent, who not uncommonly were often sick. One day Cecile was trying to put them to sleep and came up with a tale about a little elephant. “The story was so riveting, we retold it to father,” Laurent would recall later. “He was an artist and began drawing a book from it, page after page. He was very assiduous about it and eventually got absorbed by this work.” Still it could have remained a mere family story — after all, how many stories have been created by parents to soothe their children in the moments of illness — but the de Brunhoff family did not only have artists among them. There were some magazine publishers as well,
The author’s spread of the first edition of Histoire de Babar, petit elephant (fr. The Story of Babar, the Little Elep hant, Ed.) with glued illustrations and handwritten text placed by the suit give an impression of a visual guide on how to dress stylish, high-society elephants. The elephants in fact couldn’t resist Babar’s charisma and appointed him as their king. But where do these monarchic ideas originate from at a time when France was living the idea of the Popular Front? The reason could be that Babar’s creator was a distant relative of the Napoleonic soldier and marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, who in the beginning of the 19th century had been elected King of Sweden and Norway as Charles XIV. The marshal carried the Danish Order of the Elephant on his chest and a republican tattoo “Death to Kings” on his body. France met Babar in 1931. It was love at first sight and Babar was soon declared a national treasure. He turned out to be a home-grown hero as opposed to the overseas Disney army. Pictures of a little elephant in a green suit soon flooded children’s rooms across the country. He even appeared on the packet boat Normandy, a floating exhibition of the best French artists and masters of applied arts and an impressive technical feat of its time. Francis Poulenc himself couldn’t resist — he composed a musical work inspired by Babar. The elephants were now striding to Poulenc’s marching tunes rather than to the sounds of the king march medley invented by Jean de Brunhoff: “Patali Dirapata, Cromda Cromda Ripalo, Pata Pata, Ko Ko Ko!” Six years after Babar’s first triumph Jean de Brunhoff, a 37-year-old man with good looks and delicate features, a high forehead, short black hair and an ever-present long pipe died from TB. The last two of the six stories about
the little elephant were published after his passing. After the war, in 1946, Laurent de Brunhoff had to revisit the family’s national heritage. He had turned twenty at the time and was studying to become a painter. He was fascinated by abstract art but the elephant proved to be stronger. “I wanted to paint pictures, but the elephant was occupying my mind… And it has been like that with Babar for 60 years now, I have been completely… babarized!” admits Laurent de Brunhoff these days (an identical version of his father — same features, even if slightly marked by age, same forehead, same Babarian necktie) and blares with delight like an elephant at the end of his fervent speech.
Laurent de Brunhoff now resides in America with his wife and daughter. And with Babar, of course. To his father’s six books he has added twenty of his own. Among them are Babar’s USA and Babar’s Little Girl. The elep hant’s life began as a family story and so it has continued. I would certainly recommend it to other families. p. 127