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Winner of the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman.

"Michon's prose tends to slow down in order to oblige you to hear its rhythms and also to see and touch and smell what is happening beneath it."—Harper's Magazine

He was not tall, unobtrusive, but he held your attention by his feverish silence, his dark cheer, his alternately arrogant and oblique manner—grim, you would call it. At least that was true seeing him later in life. None of that appears on the Würzburg ceilings in the portrait Tiepolo left of him, when the model was twenty years old: he is there, so they say, and you can go see him there, perched among a hundred princes, a hundred constables, and ushers . . .

Corentin, a young man of humble origins, rises up in Parisian society, becoming a famous painter who is called upon to decorate the homes of Louis XIV's mistresses. Yet his masterpiece is "The Eleven," a revolutionary representation of the eleven members of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror.

Pierre Michon, born in Cards, France, in 1945, is one of France's foremost contemporary writers. He has been awarded the Prix Décembre, the Grand Prix du Roman , and the Prix de la Ville de Paris for his body of work.

Elizabeth Deshays is a teacher and a translator. She is the author of a study on bilingual education, L'Enfant Bilingue. She lives in Provence, France.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator of over twenty books from the French. Her most recent collection of poetry is Rooms and Their Airs . She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.