Extra: Sacre Sempé

WILD OLIVES, France—Jean-Jacques Sempé died Thursday at 89 just up the rutted road from this patch of Provence mountainside that I owe entirely to him and his sidekick-wife Martine Gossieaux. His fabled drawings and books say it all. To those, I can only add sacre Sempé.

In the 1980s, Gretchen Hoff, my then sidekick non-wife, came up with a perfect cover idea for “Mission to Civilize,” a book I was writing on how France civilized the world, like it or not: a Sempé version of that Joe Rosenthal photo of GIs planting an American flag on Iwo Jima.

I wrote him. He jumped at the idea, and we went to visit his Haut Var hideaway. We almost gasped at the raw beauty as the road wound up from Draguignan among soaring pines and leafy oaks, past an old stone hamlet, to a mile-long track among ancient olive groves.

Jean-Jacques was at work on a vast white board. On that, and at his soaring roofed Saint Sulpice studio in Paris, he gave the world Petit Nicolas, a whimsical modern-day Petit Prince, nearly an album a year of his dessins, about 100 New Yorker covers and so much else.

But it was the man behind his oeuvre that loomed so large. Over long dinners with friends, his eyes actually twinkled as he lanced gentle barbs and played with words. In serious moments, his grasp of human irony and geopolitical folly ran deep.

I sometimes translated his captions but to my burning regret couldn’t make time for a book idea he had. Just back from an Associated Press reporting trip to Soviet Eastern Europe, I told him about how workaday families resisted heavy-hand authority with humor and strength.

At a park in Prague, I had searched frantically for the notebook that had dropped from my back pocket. A bearded young guy in hippie gear got up from a bench and handed it to me. He was a “homeland security” goon, keeping watch on local Czechs and foreign journalists.

Those Sempé eyes lit up by another 1,000 watts. He wanted us to go back to capture anguish and absurdities behind a rusting Iron Curtain.

He and Martine were cat people. Their calico, Olive, terrorized local rodents all night, then wandered in to snooze luxuriously on a fluffy white quilt, the inspiration for some of his iconic reclining felines.

Jean-Jacques loved football, transfixed to his TV with such rapt attention that no one dared distract him. One time Gretchen tried to tease him about something during a dramatic moment; she never tried that again.

He also loved classical music. Once I drove down in Jaws, the beloved low-slung 1979 Peugeot 504 convertible that is still out my door. I took him on a Bullitt ride, racing down the curvy road to the nearby village. We both had shit-eating grins until I blasted country music. He nearly jumped out.

In the mid-1980s, I was determined to find my own place along that mystical mountainside, overlooking an old Roman route into Gaul and, across a wide ravine, the remains of a medieval fortress. Martine made it happen.

After one deal fell through, she heard of a collapsed ruin so overgrown that it took days to whack a trail to it. Centuries-old olive trees had survived by sending branches above the jungle, like periscopes, for sunlight. The old couple who owned it were reluctant to sell, but nobody resists Martine.

Thanks to her, we settled in fast among our paysan neighbors, the progeny of a big-hearted Italian couple, which fled Mussolini’s Italy and married into Provençal families.

Jean-Jacques and I lost touch for long periods, off in different directions at different times. When I saw him last year, the stroke that had slowed him down had taken a heavy toll. It had taken 13 hours to transport him from Paris in a wheelchair for a summer visit.

He was watching football, of course. The stroke had affected his speech but not those eyes. When I talked about one memorable dinner at La Fontaine in Ampus, ending with Gretchen playing Debussy at the piano, they twinkled.

These days, I think a lot about age, the passage of time and how things are changing so fast around us. Young people who grow up in a warp-speed interconnected world tend to dismiss elders as clueless relics who should be moved aside simply on principle.

Sitting there with Jean-Jacques, sharp as ever but physically silenced, I saw what a folly that is. His gift for picking up nuanced details sharpened over time, and his lived experience shaped an uncommon grasp of the human condition.

He had seen our mountainside grow hot as hell, with endemic drought and vanishing water. He followed America’s slide into lunacy with alarm. Still, until he was no longer able, he pictured what was still good about our battered planet and — without preaching — urged fresh generations to protect it.

Age is luck of the draw. At some point, it gets us all. But until it does, we can learn an awful lot from what lives well lived can teach us.