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After these discoveries, one honor followed the next. In 1849 the red ribbon of the Legion of Honour was conferred upon him. In 1854 he became a member of the Academy of Science and was named for a Chair at the Sorbonne (Fig. 5). However, he never enjoyed lecturing there, preferring to give lectures in the Collège de France, where, in 1855, he finally succeeded Magendie. In 1861 he became a member of the Medical Academy and, in 1868, was elected to become one of the “immortal” members of the Académie Française. His seat was number 29, just in front of Saint-Marc Girardin, who had declined his career as a writer. He prepared his speech in the Académie very carefully, as can be seen in the copy of his draft. He must have spent a lot of time training for his talk during his summer holidays in St. Julien since he was far from being a renowned orator.

In 1869 Claude was appointed Senator by Napoleon III. The Emperor had decided to transfer the Chair of Physiology to the Natural History Museum with a far larger laboratory. Now he was even closer to the chemist Prof. Michel Eugène Chevreul, director of this museum for many years. The two had been personal friends since 1850. Chevreul, who had “baptized” cholesterol (“cholesterine”) in 1815, died at the age of 102 in 1889. The names of both are engraved below the roof of the museum. In his Introduction into Experimental Medicine Claude Bernard mentions that his book does not add much to the thinking of his friend Chevreul.

Fig. 5. A page of the speech given by Claude Bernard at the Académie Française, with his numerous corrections [2].