Otherwise the academy, which is responsible for updating the definitive French dictionary, had always struck me as one of those essentially French institutions, enshrining the useful and the useless at the same time, fighting a quixotic rear-guard action to preserve French from change, and doing so with great pomp, circumstance and expensive uniforms. In any case it seemed impenetrable behind its austere, 17th-century facades on the Left Bank.

It turned out that the academy had been trying, and failing, to fill one of four vacancies for some time. Successive votes had come up short of the required absolute majority. The “Immortals” couldn’t find anybody worthy enough to join them. This intrigued me: It is something of a running joke in France that the highlight of the academy’s long history is its habit of systematically excluding most of the country’s greatest writers, instead filling its seats with those from the second rank.

I decided to find out more about how it was that a man like Luc Ferry could wind up in such an unpromising position. It turned out that a phone call, or calls, was not going to be enough. The staff members at the academy were polite — they came up with names of some académiciens they thought might be willing to speak with me — but firm: I would have to write individual letters to each, requesting an interview. The academy has been around since 1634 and moves slowly. I would be obligated to also.

As it happens, the only ones who responded right away were two members who defy the academy’s overwhelmingly white membership roll: the Lebanese-born novelist Amin Maalouf and the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière. Perhaps they felt less instinctively protective of the academy’s ancient customs, though it turned out that, in conversation, they were as proud of them as any member who might have been around since the founding.

But two interlocutors was not enough. Luckily for me the academy was having one of its rare induction ceremonies, for a writer “recently” admitted — a year before. (The academy moves slowly.)