Un peu de Paris

First edition illustrated with drawings by Jean-Jacques Sempé.

A pleasing copy.

Presentation copy inscribed by Jean-Jacques Sempé to a woman named Bernadette, with an original drawing depicting a street corner and a traffic light turning green.

Dear Sempé, as in a sentence by Proust, one does not immediately see where your drawing is heading, until suddenly some microscopic detail becomes the most important thing on the page and illuminates the whole with a prodigious clarity. The mountains you scribble (traffic jams, crowds, buildings, shops) are placed at the disposal of mice (grandmothers, fifty-something accountants, solitary strollers). The infinitesimal is not insignificant: destinies dwell in the back kitchen, and adventure sits down on public benches. Nothing in the world is more important than a pigeon taking flight. Or rather, forgive me: than the person watching it take flight. The Moon is not interesting: certainly less so than the finger of the one pointing at it. For no finger is ever extended in quite the same way. You are the master at detecting, within society's minute shifts, what we had confusedly sensed without being able to express it. Indeed, reality sometimes takes to doing Sempé, preferring to get there first. Out for a walk, one ends up seeing what you would have seen. But that is only an illusion: you are already perceiving something else, the very thing that had escaped us. Do we admire the bridge? It was the streetlamp that was fascinating. Do we admire the view from the balcony? It was through the window frame that one ought to have looked. Your drawings give us a second chance: they hold up to our noses what our senses had missed. A catch-up session. Every one of your lines is necessary, just as in jazz a note must be played exactly where the whole piece expects it, where the entire history of music demands it. Yes, you are our Proust: precise, sensitive, profound, and who, like flies, perceives the world after the fashion of a kaleidoscope that renders, in a single flash, every facet of reality.

 

 (article by Yann Moix, review of "Un peu de Paris")