  urlLink The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Oui, Oui, Oui, All the Way Home : "We are assured routinely by the French-allergic, or the merely French-skeptical, that the clichés of Paris and France are no longer ''operative,'' as they used to say in the Nixon years -- no longer vital or persuasive or even entirely decent.
The new France is a bleak land of bitter people, and if there are to be children's books about it, it seems, they should show old women sweltering all alone in the summer heat while their indifferent, intellectual children write hard words about America, doubting the divinity of Donald Rumsfeld and maybe even Dr. Seuss. Advertisement Yet here we are, deep in the soured new millennium, and three illustrated picture books meant for small patriotic Americans pop up for the spring, all bearing the Eiffel Tower on their covers, and two of them taking for their sole and radiant subject the Glorious Cliché, the Wonderful Place -- the City of Light, all lit up.
The Luxembourg Gardens, the tower itself, the Place Vendome, even the Folies-Bergere -- all the clichéd scenes, or, if you prefer, exotic metaphors of Paris are re-presented once again for children, in the same spirit, and sometimes in the same color tones, as they were more than 60 years ago in Bemelmans's peerless ''Madeline'' books. " 
