Le Petit Nicolas - Characters

Characters

The characters from the French edition include (with names from the English translation in square brackets):

• Nicolas (the main character) : He is sensitive and attached to true values like friendship, love of one's parents, and has some sense of justice. He is not good at arithmetic and smallest in his class.
• Clotaire : "He's bottom of the class."
• Alceste : Nicolas' best friend, "he's fat and he eats all the time."
• Eudes : "He's very strong and likes to punch our friends on the nose."
• Geoffroy : "His dad is very rich and buys him everything he wants."
• Agnan : "He is ranked first in the class and is the teacher's pet and therefore nobody likes him, but you can't hit him as often as you'd like, because he wears glasses."
• Joachim : He has a little brother.
• Maixent : He runs very fast because of his long legs.
• Rufus : "His father is a policeman, and he's got a cop's whistle."
• Marie-Edwige : "She's very nice."
• Louisette : The daughter of a friend of the mother of Nicolas; Nicolas decides he wants to marry her because she plays soccer well.
• Rex : A stray dog that Nicolas found; his real name is Kiki.

Other characters include Nicolas's parents, as well as teachers and administrators in the school. The teacher is hard-working and loves the children, although they usually drive her crazy. The superintendent, Mr. Dubon, is known as "le Bouillon" ("Old Spuds").

When Nicolas is going to a camp for vacations, he and the other children are forced to take a nap. The supervisor decides to tell them a story about "a caliph who was a very good man but who had a very evil vizier...", which is a prelude to Goscinny's future comic series Iznogoud. The supervisor then tells about how the caliph dresses as a common man to find out what people think of him, and the evil vizier takes his place, which is the plot of one Iznogoud adventure.

As an example, in the French version of one particular story, an English student named George MacIntosh is enrolled in Nicolas' class. Because the name "George" in French (Georges) is pronounced with a soft "g" (like "su" in "measure"), the class has difficulty coming up with a nickname, but eventually decides on "Djodjo," playing with the hard "dj" sound. In the English version, George's nationality had to be changed; he became Flemish, and his nickname went from "Djodjo" to "Djocky".

In this version, the teacher M. Dubon (nicknamed "le Bouillon") becomes Mr. Goodman (nicknamed "Old Spuds" from his verbal tic of demanding the children 'look him in the eye' linked to the fact that Nicholas knows potatoes have eyes). In the French version of the story, M. Dubon gets his nickname from the concept of bubbles of fat resembling eyes rising to the surface of boiling broth ("bouillon").