Cécile de Brunhoff

Co-creator of Babar the Elephant

Cécile Sabouraud, pianist: born Paris 16 October 1903; married 1924 Jean de Brunhoff (died 1937; three sons); died Paris 7 April 2003.

Without Cecile de Brunhoff there would have been no Babar the Elephant, one of the most loved children's picture-book characters of all time.

While there have been arguments about the exact contributions other wives have made to the works of their writer husbands, her role in the creation of The Story of Babar (1931) remains undisputed. It was she who first told the essence of this famous tale one evening to her two sons, the five-year-old Laurent and four-year-old Mathieu, when the latter was suffering from a bout of stomach-ache. Next day they relayed the story to their artist father, Jean, begging him to supply some pictures. When a finished book eventually resulted he wanted to include Cécile's name as co-author but she refused, believing her contribution to have been too minor.

The daughter of a prominent dermatologist who was also an art collector and a skilled sculptor, Cécile Sabouraud studied the piano under Alfred Cortot at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, where she later taught for much of her life. She met Jean de Brunhoff, four years her senior, through his friendship with her brother Mio, a fellow art student. Marrying two years later in 1924, they made an extremely attractive couple: handsome, cultured and leftwards-looking for the time.

Unable to live on his earnings as a painter, Jean was subsidised by both families and able to afford both a cook and a nanny when the couple's children began to arrive. Remembered by Laurent years later as "slim, elegant and beautiful", Cécile never shouted or seemed angry. Living near Paris and with access to well-appointed houses in the countryside, the small family plus numerous visiting kin from both sides led a charmed existence.

The original Babar story as told by Cécile in 1930 was short and to the point. Starting with the death of his mother from the gun of the "cruel hunter", Babar is then launched into human society after running away from the jungle and his own childhood. She also invented the trips he takes in a shop lift until finally asked to cease with the immortal put-down: "Sir, this is not a toy." Jean added more detail, plus the character of the Old Lady who befriends Babar. Closely modelled on his own wife, she also plays the piano, dresses her hair in an identical chignon and is always on hand with sensible maternal advice.

The family idyll came to a tragic end in 1937 when Jean died from tuberculosis of the spine. Five months later, Cécile's father died too, leaving the young widow even more alone with her three sons. Asked by her husband's publishers, Hachette, to continue supplying Babar stories, she refused on the grounds that the little elephant had died with her husband.

She also never saw herself as a natural storyteller apart from her one great success, preferring to read books to her children, including the works of Beatrix Potter and A.A. Milne. But, when Laurent began producing his own versions of Babar in 1946, Cécile was delighted, seeing this development as completely natural. Of the three sons, he had always been most like Jean, drawing elephants himself from an early age. Her other two sons followed different paths, with Mathieu becoming a paediatrician and Thierry, born just before his father died, taking up the vocation of Benedictine monk after a career as one of France's foremost concert pianists.

Sometimes criticised since for colonial overtones, the Babar story first dreamed up by Cécile comes from much deeper roots in the human imagination. As Nicholas Fox Weber points out in The Art of Babar (1989), it was composed at a time in Paris when Josephine Baker's new Casino staged trained pigeons, a live cheetah and a gorilla who rescued her from a mock typhoon. In 1931 the Exposition Coloniale, attended in Paris by the entire de Brunhoff family, also featured fabulous beasts in an overall atmosphere of wildness tamed for the greater satisfaction of all concerned.

This whole fantasy of human-animal love and co-operation on equal terms is as old as the Garden of Eden and has cropped up in innumerable stories ever since. Cécile's particular twist, backed up by the genius of her artist husband, was to show Babar as an amalgam of man and boy equally at home both in town and jungle.

Living the rest of her life in Paris, visited by sons, grandchildren and their own children, she remained an upright and elegant figure, increasingly resembling Babar's Old Lady friend as the years went by.

Nicholas Tucker