His second novel, first published in 1930, it is a story of love, society and politics in the France of 1775–1776, set largely in Picardy and Paris, which locations form its two parts.

She is married to the dashing Gaston, Vicomte de Launay, 30, a proto-Romantic, who makes her miserable by his affair with a fawn-like peasant-girl, whom he swept into his saddle one moonlit evening in the woods.

A colleague of Turgot, the reformist Finance Minister, Gaston is shocked by the condition of the rural poor and sets about reforming the estates of his father-in-law and those of his father, the bluff sensible old Comte de Launay – to the mockery and head-shaking of the noblesse and the gratitude of the paysans.

She returns to the family château, noticing in passing that without Gaston the estates have gone to rack and ruin, and asks her father to use his influence – only to learn with horror that it was he who ordered the arrest.

The authorities try to keep Cécile's identity and movements secret as they transfer her between prisons, but everywhere Madame de Rieux is taken, her looks and charm leave well-wishers, and her ingenuity clues.

Gaston requests an audience with the King, officially to give a first-hand account of events in America and to advise against French intervention, but privately to appeal for the release of Cécile.

He shared the Bloomsbury conviction that European civilisation had reached a high point (for all its shortcomings) in the Siècle des Lumières,[7] and in particular in the brilliant French women that had graced it.

[8] Lucas returned to the 18th century French setting in his short story 'Madame de Malitourn's Cold' (1936) about an estranged aristocratic couple, each unfaithful to the other, but brought together again by a comic misunderstanding.

That the conscientious Forster was a friend of Lucas's may have counted against Cécile, which was bracketed for Second Prize, to the puzzlement of some reviewers who thought it finer than the winning novel, Margaret Irwin's None So Pretty (1930).

[11][12] As a novel about the ruling classes in the decade before the Revolution, Cécile is in part a work of social criticism, not unrelated to the 1920s, as some reviewers noted, with intimations of the coming deluge.

In parallel, the American Revolution reaches its climax in the months covered by the novel, touching the lives of a number of the characters and deeply impressing European onlookers.

Cécile, in addition, contrasts the attitudes of the generations, examines various views of love, and, like Lucas's later novels Doctor Dido (1938) and The English Agent (1969), traces the tension between 18th-century rationalism and, in varying forms, Romantic "enthusiasm" and unreason.

[13] "For grace and style and insight into character," wrote Kathleen Tomlinson in The Nation and Athenaeum, "Cécile is reminiscent of Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin.

Only reminiscent, for Mr Lucas has a more profound philosophy, or wisdom, and is not content with the challenge and interplay of the individual, but extends his psychological understanding to classes and nations.

"[14] "His extraordinary gift for delightful persiflage," noted the New York Bookman, "contributes not a little towards making this novel almost as dix-huitième in spirit as Manon Lescaut is in fact.

[21] Opinion differed on the long salon scenes, The Spectator considering that they "would of themselves be enough to stamp the book with distinction",[22] Basil Davenport in the Saturday Review of Literature that "though the talk is extraordinarily good, some readers will feel there is too much of it" and a distraction from the "excellent" plot.