Quentin Blake was the first artist ever allowed to graffiti over the walls of the National Gallery, alongside Old Masters. When he was Children’s Laureate he selected 26 storytelling paintings for a show called Tell Me a Picture, and added his own embellishments. Now he’s done something similar in Paris. At the newly restored Petit Palais, just off the Champs Elysées, Blake was given carte blanche to choose 58 paintings and prints from among the 45,000 buried in the museum’s vaults, and to do his own drawings in the spaces between. The result is a captivating exhibition called Quentin Blake et les Demoiselles des Bords de Seine.

The French have a high regard for cartoon and animated drawing, and they revere Quentin Blake — “Kong-tang Blak” — as an enchanteur. They have made him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and he was given a gold medal from a society that encourages good behaviour, inscribed “Moralité, Travail, Tempérance”: “I shall wear it while drinking champagne,” he says. He has a house near Rochefort in the south west, where he will escape at Christmas.

The colonnaded Petit Palais, with its lofty decorative ceilings, mosaic floors and sweeping staircases, took five years to rebuild. In its vast, light-flooded spaces, Blake’s familiar antic figures now dance and hover over the walls (they are winged child-angels in the guise of street kids with skateboards, unicycles, baseball caps).

Having hung his chosen pictures, Blake produced his accompanying drawings at home in West London. Then they were sent to Paris and enlarged 19 times. When Gilles Chazal, director of the museum, saw them he cried, “Quelle jouissance!” (How delightful!) Being “full of life and jubilation” they add a spirit of gaiety and modernity to the 19th-century portraits and prints.

The theme of the exhibition is women. The title comes from a painting in the museum by Courbet, in which two ladies loll on the banks of the Seine. Blake’s selection depicts women labouring, laundering, nursing infants, having picnics, dressing up, dancing, tripping to town, acting on stage, carrying burdens, having confrontations, drowning (Ophelia), bathing, singing, playing violins and soothing wild animals. The vaults yielded treasures by Degas, Renoir, Courbet, Tissot, Berthe Morisot, Vuillard, Mary Cassatt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen and Chahine. Other painters, such as Jules Breton, have fallen “dans l’oubli de nos jours”, as Blake puts it. As a seasoned crusader for the cause of illustration as fine art, he invites the observer to relate the Degas matron to a girl like his own Fantastic Daisy Artichoke.

The labelling of pictures is in Quentin Blake’s distinctive hand. He has also written the exhibition notes, in French: he was a great teacher of illustration at the Royal College of Art, and can explain as well as enthuse about the way Roussel, painting a woman in a stripy dress, makes the stripy dress itself into an animated being; or a young girl painted with her bicycle, by Comerre, indicates her liberation: “I have always been fascinated by the importance of the bicycle in French life,” Blake writes. My own favourite is Paul-Albert Laurens’ Travesti: a curvaceous young woman, in satiny drag for carnival, holds a blank-eyed mask away from her face while she looks challengingly at the artist.

Blake will be 73 this week. A Somerset House retrospective of his 50-year (and 300-book) career a year ago gave us only a glimpse of his vast archive. Over a croque-monsieur in the Tuileries Gardens, he tells me that he is hopeful that the Quentin Blake Gallery of Illustration will soon find a permanent home on the South Bank in London. Meanwhile, anyone visiting Paris between now and February 12 should go to his completely charming and alluring exhibition.

Quentin Blake et les Demoiselles des Bords de Seine, Musée du Petit Palais, 75008 Paris (01 44 51 19 31), until Feb 12