All spring, around every corner in Paris, a tiny schoolboy has been rushing
around. The posters are framed on the sides of buildings, stick haphazardly
to the walls of newspaper kiosks, hang flapping from the gloomy Second
Empire buildings on the rue de Rivoli. Each one shows the miniature figure
suspended in permanent headlong flight, little red tie flapping, one arm
extended for balance, the other clutching his satchel at his side. He's
racing to school, or back from school, or (one cheerfully suspects) straight
towards mischief or something breakable. His cartoon face, sketched with an
economy of line so deft that it looks almost careless, wears an expression
of extraordinary friendliness and optimism. Whatever's around the corner,
you can tell he's thinking, ‘It's going to be brilliant fun'.
This is Le Petit Nicolas, an image as instantly recognisable to the average
French citizen as the scowling mug of that other petit Nicolas in the Élysée
Palace. For half a century the Nicolas stories, written by René Goscinny,
creator of Asterix, and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé, have been a
staple of almost every French childhood. In Goscinny's glittering pastiche
of a child's prattling narrative, the wide-eyed Nicolas recounts the stories
of his kindly but frayed parents, and his cronies at school, who are “nearly
always well-behaved”: there's Geoffroy, whose dad is rich and buys him
anything he wants, and Alceste, who's fat and eats all the time, and Agnan,
who's first in class and teacher's pet, and Eudes, who's very strong and
likes bopping people on the nose, and des tas et des tas - loads and loads -
of others besides.
Like all national icons, Nicolas has enjoyed plenty of flattery in the form of
imitation. Among the wealth of nicknames for the undersized French head of
state (Speedy Sarko, Duracell Bunny, OmniPrésident) Le Petit Nicolas is one
of the more polite. End-of-year columnists wonder jocosely whether Le Petit
Nicolas has behaved himself well enough for Father Christmas this year. A
bestselling series of humour books by the pseudonymous duo Gospé et Sempinny
recasts each child as a Cabinet minister, with an increasingly irate Petit
Nicolas throwing tantrums when the class refuses to play by his rules. After
the political drama addressed in Le petit Nicolas, Ségolène et les copains,
recent volumes have introduced a girl called Carla, who “smiled and said she
was Italian and didn't speak much French and so of course we all offered to
teach her”.
But Nicolas, whose adventures are translated into more than 30 languages, is
also a cultural ambassador. In England, Phaidon publishes beautiful
cloth-bound editions of his adventures in which Sempé's tiny people bound
across the page to accompany a typically acute English version by the
Asterix translator Anthea Bell. And this year, the 50th anniversary of
Nicolas' creation, France is acknowledging its debt to a miniature champion
of the patrimoine. More than 60,000 people have visited the free exhibition
at the Hôtel de Ville that throws Sempé's sketches and Goscinny's drafts
open to the public, and the mayor's office has been forced to extend its run
by a month. A feature film and television series are scheduled for the
beginning of the academic year in September. Meanwhile, Le ballon, the final
volume in a series of previously unpublished Nicolas stories discovered by
Goscinny's only daughter, Anne, is flying out of bookshops.
Goscinny died in 1977 of a sudden heart attack at the age of 51, but his
characters - Nicolas, Asterix, the wicked vizier Iznogoud - live as vividly
on the page as the day they were created.
Anne Goscinny, who directs her father's estate, is thrilled by the characters'
vigorous afterlife. “I think, above all, that the Nicolas books are
reassuring,” she says. “The parents argue, but it isn't serious, there's not
going to be a divorce, the children aren't fretting and worrying that they
are going to split up. And there are no intrusions from outside - no news,
no media, no press, no TV, no radio - which implies something else very
interesting: that history, with a capital H, has no place here. That the
whole drama of the Second World War never took place: that there is no war.
It's an artificial universe, sheltered from everything outside, a universe
in which it's just school, your house, the park ...
“And, in France, at least,” she goes on, “the school is absolutely
representative, in the sense that you can still find places like it in most
neighbourhoods. My son is 8, and his school is just like Nicolas'. It's
funny, in his class there's one kid who's obsessed with sweets, there's one
who goes round bashing everyone, there's one who my son's a bit jealous of
who's always at the top of the class, and one who he feels a bit sorry for
who's always last in everything. So I think the ideas that these books
embody are real, and I think in 50 more years they'll still be real. They're
universal things.”
An ideal childhood, then. “Ideal, yes,” she agrees. “But another interesting
thing is that the adults - not the mother, but the male adults, the father,
the neighbour - are projections of the children. A story set in the father's
office shows that adults have the same problems as the kids in the
classroom. There's a man who keeps rolling up little balls of paper and
chucking them, and so on ... And that I find very clever. It's a child's-eye
view of the adult world, but written by an adult who never lost his idea of
what it was like to be a child. If he had, there's no way he could have
written Nicolas, Asterix and the rest.”
At 40, and with three published novels to her name, Anne Goscinny juggles her
roles as a writer and a mother of two with her responsibilities as inheritor
of her father's estate. She has unearthed, sifted and shepherded into print
more than 200 Nicolas stories; she retains the moral rights over all her
father's creations; she sits on the awarding committee of the Prix Goscinny,
which is presented each year to a comics scriptwriter. She is Goscinny's
representative on Earth, and as faithful a curator of his legacy as any
artist could wish for. Yet her father died when she was only 9.
“I grew up at a certain remove from his characters, too,” she says, with a
rueful smile. “My father kept all that stuff at a distance, and - this will
seem strange - I didn't have access to his books either. He had all the
first editions in his study, so they were obviously very precious, and kids
make such a mess of books. I was allowed all the other books in the house,
but not his work. So I may very well have been the only child in France not
to have read Asterix.
“I started reading them only after he died,” she says, “because I realised
then that the only way for me to hear his voice was to turn the pages of a
book. But the voice is a very special one. I doubt that many children who
have lost their father are able to say 30 years later that he's still making
them laugh, that they're still finding out new things about him. Every time
I discover a new story that I didn't know before, it's not like a memory:
it's something alive, it's right there. Which is wonderful, but at the same
time very moving, and it doesn't make the work of mourning any easier.
“My own memories are less precise,” she says. “Very diffuse. I remember how in
love he was with my mother: I have clear memories of tenderness between
them, how they held hands all the time, or hugged. And less cheerfully, when
my mother fell ill for the first time in 1976 with breast cancer, I remember
my father's despair. Breast cancer then wasn't anything like it is now: it
was more or less certain death.
“But one memory I do have, which isn't visual but auditory: I remember the
sound of his typewriter. He had a huge typewriter, and the sound of those
keys and the ding of the carriage return is a sound that reminds me
instantly of my father. I remember coming home from school and hearing that
noise, and I'd know he was in his study, working, and he shouldn't be
disturbed.”
She is close to some of her father's friends. “When people talk about him I'm
very happy. But it's difficult to know that I can never experience the
things people are telling me except at this remove. It shakes me up a bit,
especially when someone tells me about something funny that he'd do or say.
I listen, I laugh, but I'm sometimes a little tearful that I never got to
live it.”
And Anne Goscinny takes her responsibilities seriously. With Albert Uderzo,
the illustrator of Asterix, she recently arranged to sell audiovisual and
merchandising rights for the combative Gaul to the international publisher
Hachette. This raises the possibility of other writers taking over the
franchise after Uderzo's retirement. She says: “I thought, well, Asterix has
already had two lives, one from 1959 to 1977 with my father and another one
from 1977 to, I hope, the very distant future, with Albert in sole control.
My father died, but would it have been reasonable to expect an entire
village to perish because of the death of one man? And I apply the same
reasoning here. I'm not talking about death, but if Albert decides one day
that he's had enough of putting all his time and energy into Asterix and
wants to pass on the baton, I think the character is sufficiently strong
that there's no risk of his being led astray.”
She, however, has no plans to pass on the baton. “If you're the descendant of
a man like that,” she says with determination, “you just can't behave as
though it all didn't exist. You have to be clear with yourself, and say,
well, in my life, short or long as it may be, I'm going to have two lives:
one dedicated to his work, and one to my own, to my books, my children, my
friends. You need to be able to switch hats fairly swiftly. But I don't have
the right to behave as though he was just like everyone else. It would be an
offence to his memory.”
Nicholas, Nicholas Again, Nicholas and the Gang and Nicholas in Trouble are
published by Phaidon at £12.95. To order them for £11.66 inc p&p
each, call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/
booksfirst
The Petit Nicolas exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris runs until July 4
Win a Eurostar Family Trip to Paris with Nicholas on Holiday
For a chance to win a free trip to Paris for your family on Eurostar, answer
the following question about Nicholas correctly and you will be entered into
the prize draw. Please go to www.phaidon.com to enter the competition.
Winners will be notified via email by 15 August 2009.
Q. What is the name of the camp that Nicholas goes to in Nicholas on Holiday?
a) Shells-by-the-Sea Camp
b) Sands-by-the-Sea Camp
c) Fun-by-the-Sea Camp
