Hotel Talleyrand by Paul Hyde Bonner SIGNED! [FIRST EDITION] 1953 • Charles Scribner's Sons

Hotel Talleyrand: A Novel of Paris by Paul Hyde Bonner 

FIRST EDITION • FIRST PRINTING [1953] CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

True 1st with half title page signed and personally inscribed by author Paul Hyde Bonner. 

Vintage hardcover with dust jacket.  Dust jacket has some torn edges; but is clean and fully in tact; now housed in a new archival quality jacket protector.

Book itself is in beautiful shape.  Clean boards.  Tight binding.  Pages read beautifully.

Hotel Talleyrand has those attractive qualities that made Paul Hyde Bonner's novel about modern Rome, SPOR, so popular. It is at once lighthearted and serious, diverting and yet firmly grounded on reality.

The characters:  Members of the American diplomatic personnel in Paris and Parisians. Some of them are sophisticated and some are innocent, and their very relationship creates drama.

Their story is set in Paris in the year 1950, and the background is the American effort to check the growth of Communism in Europe; in fact, the "Hôtel Talleyrand" of the title is the elegant and historic structure which now houses much of the work of practical American diplomacy abroad.

S. Livingston Locke, a New York banker, is at present in a high position in E. C. A., but he is a coldly ambitious man and is angling for an ambassadorship. His wife, Eleanor, finding little warmth in her marriage, takes a friendly interest in one of the American economists attached to her husband's staff. As the story progresses, this young man, Walter Haines, unknowingly becomes a victim of Communist espionage, for he falls in love with a lovely Communist spy named Germaine, who during the war had been active in the Communist arm of the Resistance. Assigned by the Apparatus to live with Walter, the French girl, although she is a dedicated and disciplined Communist, soon finds herself very much a woman in an emotional involvement.