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Little elephant Babar is star of new exhibition

NEW YORK: Once upon a time, a woman who belonged to an illustrious French publishing family was trying to get her two young sons to sleep.

Perhaps sensing the fascination children have with very large animals, she told them about a baby elephant who had lived an idyllic life in the jungle, adored by his mother, until one day, she was shot by a hunter.

Overcome with grief, the orphaned elephant ran away to a city (which bore an uncanny resemblance to Paris) and there he met a woman who showered him with gifts, including a suit “of a becoming shade of green.”

So began the adventures of Babar, the beloved protagonist of nearly four dozen children’s books and now the subject of a small, charming exhibit at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum.

It turns out that the woman who told that bedtime story, Cecile de Brunhoff, was married to a painter whose family were well-connected publishers. Her husband, Jean de Brunhoff, transformed the bare-bones tale his wife told their sons into one of the best loved children’s books of all time, The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant.

Jean de Brunhoff wrote six more Babar stories after the first one was published in 1931, before dying at age 37 of spinal tuberculosis.

Several years after his death in 1937, the family franchise was taken over by Jean and Cecile’s eldest son, Laurent, who had listened to the bedtime story for the first time as a child of 5.

Now 83 and living in New York, Laurent de Brunhoff, also a painter, has written 37 more Babar books that have transported the elephant and his family all over the world, and even into outer space. Several years ago, Babar ventured into the realm of fitness with Babar’s Yoga for Elephants.

In 2004, the Morgan Library, which is known for its collection of rare books and manuscripts, acquired nearly all the working drafts for Jean de Brunhoff’s first book, as well as drawings for the first book written by his son, Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur, published in 1946.

One gallery is devoted to the father’s work, another to the son’s. In each of the rooms, pages from the published books are displayed next to earlier drafts and sketches, highlighting each man’s painstaking editorial and artistic process.

“It’s very rare to have such a complete record of a work we know so well,” said Christine Nelson, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts.

Some of the changes that the elder de Brunhoff made over successive drafts are surprising. In early versions of the first Babar story, for example, there was no Celeste — Babar’s bride — and Babar wore a grey suit, not his trademark green. In an even more dramatic change, the initial drafts began with the scene in which Babar’s mother is gunned down by a hunter.

De Brunhoff apparently reconsidered, deciding instead to begin on a note of domestic bliss. And so the final version opens with scenes of the baby elephant being rocked to sleep by his mother and playing with the other little elephants in the forest.

Prior knowledge of the elephant king is not a requirement for this exhibition. Copies of some of the Babar books are available for visitors to browse through.

Even if you grew up with the Anglo tales of Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit, and your own children are devotees of Harry Potter, this exhibit is likely to leave you enchanted with the story of the good-hearted French elephant in his becoming green suit. — AP

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