How Babar the Elephant charmed the world

By Rick Domas

Children’s events play an important part of the Horsham Museum’s overall programming. Thanks to Curator Nikki Caxton and her hard-working staff, it’s one of the several strengths of the museum.

Many a parent and grandparent have spent at least part of a school holiday at the museum partaking in some craftwork or simply viewing the museum’s rooms, a number of
which are geared to children.

Accordingly, parents and young children in Horsham and around the world mourned the
loss of Laurent de Brunhoff, son of Babar the Elephant creator Jean de Brunhoff, who
continued the Babar series for nearly seven decades after his father’s death.

Mr de Brunhoff died earlier this spring on March 22, 2024, aged 98.

Babar has his origins in a suburban Parisian home in 1930 as a bedtime story told by Laurent’s mother Cécile to Laurent, aged five, and his brother Mathieu, four.

Mathieu was sick and to comfort him Cécile, a pianist and music teacher, improvised a tale about a little elephant whose mother was shot by hunters and then rescued and taken to Paris, where an exciting new life awaited.

“My mother started to tell us the story to distract us,” de Brunhoff recalled in a 2014 nterview with National Geographic.

“We loved it and the next day we ran to our father’s study, which was in the corner of the garden, to tell him about it. He was very amused and started to draw and that was how the story of Babar was born.”

Laurent’s father Jean, an artist, named the baby bear Babar and the first book, Histoire de Babar le petit éléphant, was published in France in 1931, making Babar more or less a contemporary of Winnie-the-Pooh (first published in 1926).

An English translation, The Story of Babar, followed shortly in 1933.

In Paris, Jean imagined, Babar is rescued by a rich woman (referred to as the Old Lady) who introduces him to all sorts of modern delights. He rides a department store elevator up and down. He buys a suit in “a becoming shade of green” and a pair of spats, perhaps the least sartorial of his otherwise fashionable choices.

Jean authored and illustrated six more Babar books before dying of tuberculosis in 1937, when he was just 37 and Laurent was just 12.

The last two books were only partly colored at Jean’s death, having been commissioned by the British newspaper The Daily Sketch.

Jean’s brother, Michel de Brunhoff, an editor of French Vogue, oversaw their final publication, arranging for the drawings to be coloured and employing the then 13-year-old Laurent to assist with the work.

Like his father, Laurent trained to be a painter, working in oils and exhibiting his abstract works at a Paris gallery. But when he turned 21, he decided to enter the family business, so to speak, and carry on the adventures of Babar.

“If I became a writer and artist of children’s books,” Mr de Brunhoff wrote in 1987 for the
catalogue that accompanied a show of his work at the Mary Ryan Gallery in Manhattan, “it
was not because I had in mind to create children’s books; I wanted Babar to live on (or, as
some will say, my father to live on).

“I wanted to stay in his country, the elephant world which is both a utopia and a gentle satire on the society of men.”

His first effort, Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur, was published in 1946. Mr de Brunhoff
would go on to write and illustrate more than 45 more Babar books.

His last book, Babar’s Guide to Paris, was published in 2017.

Babar’s stories have been translated into 18 languages, including Japanese and Hebrew, and have sold many millions of copies.

Charles de Gaulle was a fan as was Maurice Sendak (American author and illustrator of children’s books). American First Lady Laura Bush, a former librarian, an ardent
lover of books, and co-founder in 2001 of The National Book
Festival, is as well.

The Babar series is on “Laura Bush’s Family Favorites” as recommended books for reading to and with young children. (Also on the First Lady’s list: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and Curious George by H.A. Rey — all Domas family favorites. First Lady Laura Bush knows how to pick ‘em!).

Like many parents, I too created bedtime stories for my two girls Kate and Becca. Mine were about “two little girls” named Sarah and Hannah, the setting was the Great Depression (late 1920s-1930s), and the locale my grandparents’ 24-acre farm in a rural part of Louisiana, USA.

Much of the goings-on of Sarah and Hannah were based on my summer stays with my grandparents and interactions with my country cousins, aunts and uncles.

I’m presently writing down my oral Sarah-Hannah stories to create a written family history of
them. I encourage you to do the same with your bedtime stories.

Laurent de Brunhoff spent a lifetime in Babar’s world, bringing joy and many, many, many
pleasurable reading hours and cozy bedtimes to millions around the world. I’d call that a life
well lived!