French novelist, philosopher and journalist Jean d'Ormesson, "who once ranked as the youngest member of the prestigious Académie Française, and who sponsored the first woman to join its elite numbers," died December 5, the New York Times reported. He was 92. A descendant of French nobility, d'Ormesson published about 40 works of fiction, many of them autobiographical, over almost a half-century.
Few of his works were translated, though Barbara Bray's translation of La Gloire de l'Empire (The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, a History) was a notable exception. Winner of the academy's Grand Prix, the book was praised by William Beauchamp, a French literature scholar, in the New York Times Book Review as "one of the most engrossing histories ever written--yet not a word of it is true... Jean d'Ormesson's empire is pure invention; his book, fictional history. If numerous details suggest the real empires of Rome, Persia, Byzantium, of Alexander or Charlemagne, they are devices designed to achieve verisimilitude--the illusion of reality."
When d'Ormesson entered the Académie Française in 1973, at the age of 48, he was the youngest of its 40 members, all of whom were male. In 1981, he sponsored Marguerite Yourcenar to join the academy, and even though "he incurred much criticism and not a few misogynistic jibes for his championing her, she was accepted."