1981 - 1982
Marguerite Yourcenar’s Uniform for the Académie Française

On March 6, 1980, the writer Marguerite Yourcenar was elected a member of the Académie française. She was the first woman to receive this honor. On January 22, 1981, Jean d’Ormesson welcomed her with the following declaration: “Madame, it is with great joy that I welcome you into this old and illustrious house where you find yourself, not as the first male guest but as the first female guest, a sort of hapax of academic vocabulary, a pacific and lively revolution, and you alone constitute perhaps one of the most considerable events in a long and glorious history. I will not hide from you, Madame, the fact that you are not here today because you are a woman. It is because you are a great writer.”

Yves Saint Laurent designed for her a velvet cloak with a shawl to cover her head. “Marguerite’s entrance was rather stunning,” wrote the critic Matthieu Galey.