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I know what the chess piece represents and who was inside as I am familiar with the work from which the quotation is taken (and the quotation itself) and even have an A Level in that language but I can't see how replacing the 6 letters for "ghosts" with a word from the quotation denoting a nationality produces new words, one in French. I'll keep trying.

I see now it's the English translation of the nationality word in the quotation which is what I was hinting at in my first post but obviously not very clearly! Thanks for all your help.

Another warning : both my old ODQ and concise ODQ have the last word of the quotation as 'ferentis', though the Penguin DQ shows 'ferentes'.

Meursault, your warning might save some solvers with older editions a bit of agonising. My fourth edition of the Concise ODQ (2003) is correct.

I have a query about 35d. I have never seen L clued as 'long' before. It's not in Chambers, nor in the other main reference, Oxford. 'Small' for S and 'large' for L are also not used in the Listener because Chambers, rather oddly, has never included them.
On top of that, the clue seems to be grammatically faulty because it's a clue to EPL. 'X before Y is up' can only be sensibly read as [X before Y} is up (reversed). To mean LEP the main verb, 'is' needs to be omitted, giving the equivalent of 'L before Y reversed.'

All done apart from a parsing: why "and cycling expert" in 22D?

Oner is an expert.

Cycling means back rotated to front so becomes Nero

An expert = oner; with the "o" cycling from 1st to last letter.

Thanks both!

If people still studied Latin they would know that the word beginning "ferent..." had to agree in case with "Danaos which is an accusative plural so it has to be "ferentes" rather than "ferentis" which is genitive singular, he wrote, snootily. My Boris Johnson moment of the week.

I have completed the grid but cannot parse 13 ac. I assume that this includes a misprint of the second letter of the source but cannot resolve tha answer with the definition. Help please.