Translated from the original French by Nicolas Monjo. Wine colour hard covers with gilt titles on the spine. Small surface smudge on the front board and a tiny white speck on the back. Light tanning on the first and last free endpapers. Binding is tight, text is clean and unmarked. Troyat was a Russian born French author. Elizabeth is part of the series The Seed and the Fruit, and centres around ten year old Elizabeth. Her world is precocious, innocent, imaginative and lonely and when her health demands it, a boarding school is the solution. But not for Elizabeth because, at Mlle. Quercy's Sainte-Colombe, she has had no religious training, her best friend dies, and her constant rebellion costs her good marks and earns her ostracism. Her most defiant gesture results in pneumonia which, in turn, sends her to the south of France to her mother's people to be tutored during the summer. There the close family life, the country and a chance to stay there for school, bring Elizabeth far from her Parisian background. Again the petitpoint of French life, here in the '20's, the small details that make up character and background, and the flow of time fill in a carefully documented picture.