Taking out a little card, he drew, from left to right, three progressively larger circles connected by horizontal lines. They represented three stages of his life, he explained: Bordeaux, where he was born; Paris, where he moved in the 1950s; and New York, where he realized a lifelong dream in the late 1970s, when he began to publish in The New Yorker, which continues to feature his covers and drawings.
Pointing to the Paris circle, he said: "In the beginning I felt much more alone in Paris than in New York. The weight of the French bourgeoisie weighs very heavily, and makes it hard to enter into Parisian society. Here it's very different. In Paris I always felt guilty looking for work, but here people understand that that's just part of life."
Sempe, it turns out, was the classic late bloomer. He explained that he was expelled from school, though he was merely distrait — easily distracted and undisciplined, that is — but not mean or bad. He took exams for the post office, a bank and the railroad, and after failing them all, wound up selling tooth powder from door to door in the countryside.
In 1950 he lied about his age and enlisted in the army. "That was the only place that would give me a job and a bed," he explained. But there, too, his career was checkered. He was initially thrown in the brig for falsifying his papers, and on resuming duty was sometimes reprimanded for drawing when he was supposed to be standing watch.
Upon being discharged, he moved to Paris and scrounged around, trying to sell cartoons to the newspapers. His first breakthrough was the chance to work with Goscinny, but the decisive influence upon him was some copies of The New Yorker he happened to see around this time. "All of them, I don't want to leave anyone out," he said. "Charles Addams. Saul Steinberg. James Thurber. They made such an impression on me that I saw only three or four copies and then decided never to look at the magazine again. They were too great."
Asked to describe the evolution of his drawing, Sempe made a roller-coaster motion with his hand, but in fact he hit upon his distinctive style early on — the delicate, spidery line; the long perspectives; the eloquent use of white space and of gray washes — and stuck with it. And he has almost unintentionally become a kind of social chronicler, though more wistful than critical. He will never again write a book like Monsieur Lambert, he said, "because people now say things that are even more stupid, but they use even bigger words, and the humor in that always develops into satire. It makes me sad."
These days, he added, he spends more time at his desk in Montparnasse than he does strolling the streets, and he seldom knows what he's going to draw until he sits down. "It's not about intelligence," he said. "It's about endurance."
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