French author Marc Lambron, one of the 40 elected members of the distinguished Académie Française, founded by Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII in 1635 to cherish and protect the French language, was in Malta earlier this month for a brief stay with his partner Delphine.  They expressed their satisfaction at having had the opportunity to captivate the chivalrous past of the island and appreciate the renowned Maltese hospitality.

Occupying seat 38 of the eminent academy – the same seat known for a famous previous occupant, French novelist and poet Anatole France – Lambron was elected to his seat in 2014. He is the author of more than a score of novels, among them his first L'Impromptu de Madrid, written while stationed at the French Embassy in Madrid in 1983.

Journalist, literary critic, chronicler and diarist, he received the prestigious Prix Femina in 1993 for his novel L’oeil du silence, based on the adventurous life of American photographer Lee Miller, who after covering the WWII Blitz in London in 1944, was one of two women photographers accredited with the US Army to follow the liberation of Paris and Alsace.  His last publication Le monde d’avant (Grasset, 2023) revisits, through the memories of his grandfather, the lost France of the past with a text that is “as dense as a tomb and beautiful as an elegy”.

While on the Island, Lambron and his partner were shown around Valletta by Charles Xuereb, both having in common an old friend of Malta, former French ambassador Daniel Rondeau, who is also one of the ‘eternal French writers’ of the Académie Française.