The Girl at the Lion d’Or was published by Hutchinson in 1989. It is the first volume of Faulks’s French trilogy — followed by Birdsong (1993) and Charlotte Gray (1998) — and establishes the themes that would preoccupy him across the sequence: the relationship between personal passion and historical violence, the way private stories unfold against public catastrophe, and the particular English fascination with France as a landscape of emotional possibility.
Anne Louvert arrives at a small hotel, the Lion d’Or, in a provincial French town in 1936. She is young, beautiful, and fleeing something: a dead father, a shameful secret connected to his death, a need to begin again. She takes work at the hotel and begins an affair with Charles Hartmann, a married Jewish lawyer whose political activities (he is connected to the socialist government of Léon Blum) place him in increasing danger as the 1930s progress toward war and persecution.
The novel operates in two registers simultaneously: as a love story (restrained, elegantly constructed, observant of the rituals of provincial French life) and as a political novel (the Popular Front, anti-Semitism, the approach of war). Anne’s personal secret and Charles’s political vulnerability mirror each other: both are people whose pasts make their presents precarious, both are living in a society that will eventually turn against them.
Faulks’s prose style — lucid, emotionally controlled, precise in its observation of landscape and architecture — is already fully formed in this first novel. He writes France as an Englishman who loves it: attentive to sensory detail (food, wine, light, stone), respectful of its social codes, and alert to the darkness beneath the civilized surface.
Collecting The Girl at the Lion d’Or
First edition (Hutchinson, London, 1989): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $75–$200
- Without jacket: $8–$15
Faulks’s second novel (after A Trick of the Light, 1984, which he later disowned) and the beginning of the French trilogy. Values increased substantially after Birdsong made Faulks famous.