If you want to conjure up the essence of Frenchness in the later 20th century, a few names will spring to mind. There would be be Charles de Gaulle, Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Tati, the creator of Monsieur Hulot. You might also cite a good friend of that late film-maker: Jean-Jacques Sempé.
Though less known here, for two generations the innocent-seeming cartoons of Sempé have conveyed the melancholy elegance that defines France and especially Paris. Sempé is the creator of those wistful little characters — old ladies on bicycles, hen-pecked husbands, meek businessmen, ballerinas, musicians and cats — who have featured for decades in Paris Match and The New Yorker and in Punch before its demise. Everyone recognises Sempé’s whimsical “coup de