Michel Déon - The Foundling Boy

8 Édouard Herriot served three terms as Prime Minister in the Third Republic and for many years as president of the Chamber of Deputies.

9 The nickname of a Genoese boy, Giovan Battista Perasso, who started a revolt in 1746 against the Habsburg forces occupying the city. Two hundred years later Italy’s Fascist government named the Opera Nazionale Balilla, a paramilitary youth organisation, after him.

10 A youth movement aligned with the aims of the Parti Radical , France’s oldest political party.

11 Leopoldo Fregoli, a famous Italian impersonator and quick-change artist of the early 20th century.

12 The ‘Norman hole’: a measure of calvados drunk between courses that is intended to refresh the palate and reawaken the appetite.

13 On the east side of the port.

14 Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la Langue Française is a four-volume dictionary originally published in Paris in 1863–72.

15 La Nouvelle Revue Française , a literary magazine founded in 1909 that was the precursor of the publishing house, Éditions Gallimard.

16 Le Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, first awarded by the Académie Goncourt in 1903 after its foundation by Edmond de Goncourt in memory of his brother Jules.

17 ‘Motherland’.

18 The logistics and supply corps of the French army, created by Napoleon in 1807.

19 Service de Garde des Voies de Communication.

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 Where Are You Dying Tonight?