Yourcenar, Marguerite

French author of Belgian origin, born in Brussels. Her mother died the same year due to puerperal fever. Marguerite was raised alone by the father, the Frenchman Michel de Crayencourt, an aristocratic cosmopolitan who loved women and to play high. He was also an educated man who gave his daughter a both classical and individualistic education. Together with him, she discovered England and Italy, and learned Greek, Latin, and English. Everything she learned, she gathered freely and passionately, not infrequently during travels, a schooling which by time would bear fruit in Yourcenar’s unique feeling for language and for foreign and historically distant worlds of ideas and mentalities.