Trade the amorous skunk's funky aroma for the blue cloud of the Frenchman's smouldering Gitanes, and Pepe's lecherous pursuit of Penelope Pussycat for Gainsbourg's unswerving passion for the double entendre, and the pair seem fashioned from the same Gallic stereotype.
Except, Gainsbourg's magnetism was real. Sure, he cultivated his oily reputation and courted the controversy that surrounded his more risque works, but it's impossible to ignore the impact his life-affirming, bold presence had on popular music.
His take on agony, ecstasy, joy and misery was always delivered with the assured swagger of an artist unbound by convention.
No surprise, then, that his most fully realised rock album should occupy the same provocative territory as Nabokov's Lolita.
Gainsbourg's 1971 LP Histoire de Melody Nelson is a perfectly framed cinematic journey through a Humbert Humbert-like fantasy.
Less a concept album and more a 28-minute erotic short story, it tells the tale of the narrator's encounter with an underage English girl, whom he ploughs into (deliberately?) with his Rolls-Royce as she cycles towards him.
A seduction ensues, tidied up nicely by the girl's subsequent death as her plane drops from the sky on her return to her homeland.
Putting aside the sensational storyline, the real steam here is created between Gainsbourg and his genius musical partner, producer/arranger Jean-Claude Vannier.
Strings orchestrated to spine-tingling effect intertwine with slinky, coiling bass lines and suppressed, distorted guitars that cross Italian porn flick with free-form jazz-rock jam.
Drums are never pounded; they pitter-patter in syncopation with the ebbs and flows of the dodgy tale.
Gainsbourg moves between intense, spoken-word tracts and lightly sung pieces augmented by the breathy sighs and giggles of his then girlfriend and inspiration, actress Jane Birkin.
And when a choir of 70 lifts the album's eight-minute climax skyward, he is left with nothing but vain hope and memories to soothe his pain.
