One of the review copies, stamped as such.
Signed presentation inscription: “à Maurice Genevoix, hommage sympathique, Marguerite Yourcenar - Les personnages de Denier du rêve demeurent ceux de Rendu à César.”
This collection brings together four plays: Le Dialogue dans le marécage, La Petite Sirène, Électre ou la chute des masques and Le Mystère d’Alceste. Written between 1932 and 1963, they show the dramatic side of Marguerite Yourcenar’s early work, in which the great myths of antiquity and traditional tales serve as a springboard for a meditation on passion, death and sacrifice.
Maurice Genevoix’s copy: Marguerite Yourcenar (born 1903) and the author of Sous Verdun and Raboliot (born 1890) shared several essential traits: a lucid humanism, a demanding style and a deep attachment to the transmission of memory.
Before her election to the Académie française on March 6, 1980 — a historic turning point, since no woman had ever before been received under the Coupole — Yourcenar was first elected to the Académie royale de Langue et de Littérature françaises de Belgique, received on March 27, 1971, less than two months before the publication of Théâtre I. Maurice Genevoix was present on that occasion: the Permanent Secretary of the Académie française had come to award the Prix Habif, the Grand Prix de littérature française hors de France, to the Canadian writer Anne Hébert.