Dorothy L Sayers' distinguished detective novel Gaudy Night is set in 1935 Oxford, her own university, and has a running theme of praise for academic life and scholarly attitudes. The chapter-head epigraphs are therefore appropriately selected from learned writers of C16 & C17: Robert Burton, William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Dekker, John Donne, Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, Michael Drayton, William Turner, Elizabeth I.

The epigraph to chapter 9, on the theme of noblesse oblige, is by one Pierre Erondell:~

"Come hether friend, I am ashamed to hear that what I hear of you . . . You have almost attayned to the age of nyne yeeres, at least eight and a halfe, and seeing that you knowe your dutie, if you neglect it you deserve greater punishment then he which through ignorance doth it not. Think not that the nobilitie of your Ancestors doth free you to doe all that you list, contrary‑wise, it bindeth you more to followe vertue." — Pierre Erondell

"Not traced" is the brief note in Bill Peschel's useful online annotations to the novel.

Attempts to google this M Erondell led solely to this note of Mr Peschel's. Assuming his name to translate as 'Peter Swallow', from French hirondelle, perhaps he and this 'quote' are pastiche referential inventions of Miss Sayers' own: but none of the colloquial meanings of 'hirondelle' in Harrap's French-English Dictionary of Slang & Colloquialisms seems to me to have any application to the theme of the novel, or to the name of her fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey, apart from the forename.

Mudcatters collectively know everything. Has anyone heard of 'Pierre Erondell', does anyone know anything of his life & work ~~ or, alternatively, have any suggestion as to the source & application of the name, if invented?

~Michael~