From her true name Marguerite de Crayencour (anagram of Yourcenar), she was born in Brussels in 1903 but her mother dies after the childbirth and she comes back with her father from which she has French nationality, to pass his childhood and her adolescence in the field of her paternal family in the French Flanders. In Archives of North, she recalls her origins thus, that her biographers have evil to follow. She has also a middle-class residence in the old center of the city of >Lille.

Nourished of a humanistic culture, this novel writer travels much before settling into 1940 in the United States, from which she will take nationality. She wrote translations, poems, plays. But it is undoubtedly the novel which will make known her and especially her Memories of Hadrian (1951) where she delivers a thought to us on the end of civilizations.

She takes again French nationality a few weeks before being the first woman elected with the French Academy in 1980.

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