Bernard Tristan – Secrets of State: A young French teacher is hired by the embassy of a small Germanic country to translate and inform the government of the news of his country. Gradually, he meets the Chancellor, the King and all the important people of this small state. His sympathies and events will make him aware of many secrets. The underside of conspiracies and attacks reveal to him a sordid struggle of power. But he knows too much: how can he escape the fate promised to him and restore order in the state apparatus? Not that he wishes … An excellent novel, a little police and a little spying, by one of the precursors of the genre …

Close to Leon Blum, Jules Renard, Lucien Guitry, Paul Gordeaux, Marcel Pagnol, and many others, famous for his play on words, his crosswords and his theater boulevard, writer-chronicler-sportsman-gastronome, Tristan Bernard was also a successful novelist writer. He contributed to the detective genre with his collection Amants et Voleurs (1905) and several other novels. Arrested as a Jew in 1943 and interned in Drancy, he narrowly escaped deportation. Published in La Presse in 1900, this sentence of Francis de Croisset sums up our author very well: “He has meticulous and analytical observation. He scrutinizes the human heart with pinpricks. He searches it with his short nails, with the acute and tickling pleasure that one feels at scratching a pimple. “