Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

11. The Society for the Keepers of the Peace.

12. Intrigue and Love , Friedrich von Schiller’s bourgeois tragedy, whose plot owes much to Romeo and Juliet and contains an anti-British message.

13. A French company manufacturing aircraft engines, motorcycles and bicycles until the 1950s.

14. Cartoon characters created by the illustrator and scientist Marie-Louis-Georges Colomb, known as Christophe. Cosinus invents a series of wildly outlandish means of transport, but himself never leaves Paris.

15. The church of Saint-Gervais in Paris’s Marais district, hit by a German shell from the long-range gun ‘Big Bertha’ on Good Friday, 29 March 1918. The shell killed 88 people and wounded 68, the worst single loss of civilian life in Paris in the First World War.

16. The tax collectors of France who, under the ancien régime , collected duties on behalf of the king.

17. Year II of the Republican calendar, which approximates to 1790 in the Gregorian (western) calendar.

18. Crème chantilly with chocolate inside.

19. Dépôt = part of the Paris Conciergerie on Quai de l’Horloge, used for prisoners awaiting judgment.

20. Les Thibaut , a multi-volume roman fleuve by Roger Martin du Gard.

21. Originally known as Jeanne Laisné, Jeanne Hachette (‘Jean the Hatchet’) was a French heroine who in 1472 helped prevent the capture of the town of Beauvais by the army of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

22. Raoul Ponchon (1848–1937), a friend of Arthur Rimbaud’s.

23. A Paris street kid.

24. 4 August, the night when the nobility traditionally renounce their privileges.

25. Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661), an abbess and important figure in Jansenism, the branch of Catholicism to which Blaise Pascal adhered.

26. Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (1581–1643), abbot of Saint-Cyran, who introduced Jansenism into France.

27. Théâtre Français, by which the Comédie Française is also known.

28. Édouard Bourdet (1887–1945), playwright of dramas of manners and artistic director of the Comédie Française from 1936 to 1940.

29. The Jerónimos monastery (Mosteiro dos Jerónimos) at Belém.

30. The leading French engineering training institution.

31. Literally ‘youth sites’, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française were a paramilitary organisation set up in 1940 after conscription was abolished in the wake of France’s defeat.

32. One of the novels in Honoré de Balzac’s series, La Comédie humaine ( The Human Comedy ).

33. The elite French equestrian corps.

34. ‘ Pincer l’oreille à Jules ’ = a military euphemism for emptying the latrine buckets.

35. Francs-tireurs et Partisans, the French resistance group created in 1941 by the French Communist Party.

Michel Déon is a member of the Académie Française and the author of more than fifty works of fiction and non-fiction. He lives in Ireland with his wife and has many horses.

Julian Evans is a writer and translator from French and German. He has previously translated Michel Déon’s The Foundling Boy .