Marguerite Yourcenar at the table

At her home in Maine, Yourcenar did not follow the classic French starter-main-dessert structure: she set a sober, almost monastic table, organized around a few ritual moments — the simple garden dish eaten at a fixed hour, the afternoon tea drunk in large quantities, the reserve of wild fruit for winter, and, on days of receptions or Mediterranean memory, a clear dish evoking the Greece and Rome that haunted her books. Everything is measured, vegetable-based, attentive to the season and the landscape.

Yourcenar drank tea throughout the day, in quantities her friends considered considerable. It is the warm, bitter thread that runs through her whole table, from the working morning to the evening vigil — her writer's fuel and her meditation ritual.