Imaginary interview with Marguerite Yourcenar
by Charactorium · Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 — 1987) · Literature · 6 min read
Northeast Harbor, Maine, late autumn afternoon. The wind comes from the ocean and makes the wood of Petite Plaisance creak, where thousands of books rise to the ceiling. Marguerite Yourcenar receives us, tea already served, a Greek-Latin dictionary open on the table like a door left ajar.
—How did you manage to make a Roman emperor dead for eighteen centuries speak?
Through the ear, before the pen. For a long time I thought I had lost Hadrian: I had sketched something in the twenties, then abandoned it, convinced that one could not write the voice of a man one had not lived enough oneself. In 1948, opening an old trunk shipped from Europe, I found my notes among letters and photographs, and everything started again. I wanted to write a memoir in the first person, what I call apocryphal memoirs: not a biography, but a consciousness watching itself die. For that, I had to touch the matter of his life — the Roman coins bearing his likeness, spread out under the lamp, gave me back his face better than many treatises.
A biography tells of a man; an apocryphal memoir makes him breathe.
—What were you looking for, exactly, as you walked the ruins of Hadrian's Villa?
The ground beneath his feet. You don't reconstruct a man with ideas about him; you must walk where he walked. At Tivoli, in that Hadrian's Villa he had built as a summary of the known world, I spent hours measuring the light on collapsed stones, imagining the pools he wanted to populate with landscapes from his entire life. I returned several times, my notebooks filling with sketches and dates. Reading the Lives of the Caesars, I had found only puppets; at Tivoli, I felt someone truly intelligent, capable of seeing clearly. The book was born from that gap between chronicle and stone.
—Do you remember what was objected to you during your election to the Académie française?
That the statutes of 1635 knew only men. Some gentlemen, sincerely embarrassed, observed that one did not quite know how to name a woman among Immortals conjugated in the masculine for three and a half centuries. When I was elected to seat 3, in 1980, I felt neither triumph nor revenge: only the quiet amusement of seeing a venerable institution discover that half of humanity existed. I was, moreover, quite far away, on my island of Maine, to watch this little storm with the detachment it deserved. I was being let in through a door that should long ago have had no more panels.
I was being let in through a door that should long ago have had no more panels.
—Did you feel you were bearing a symbolic burden when you entered the Dome?
I distrust symbols placed on a person's back; they end up crushing them. They wanted to make me a banner, and I am only a writer who has worked long and alone. That said, I am not naive: entering under the Dome in 1980, the first woman since the foundation, was to publicly admit that the mind has no sex, which literature already knew since Sappho. I prepared my speech as one prepares a crossing, preserving my freedom of tone. The important thing, I believe, was not that I entered, but that the thing, henceforth, would cease to be a remarkable exception and become simply natural.
—Why did you choose to write your major works from a nearly wild island, far from Paris?
Because silence is a faithful collaborator. Petite Plaisance, in Northeast Harbor, is a simple wooden house open to the forests and the ocean; I have lived there since 1950 with Grace Frick, who was my companion and the first to carry my sentences into the English language. I often get up at dawn for a long walk, observing birds and plants with the attention of a naturalist, and it is there, with the calm still intact, that the work is most fruitful. Paris, I returned to only for my publishers at Gallimard. One writes the world better when one keeps a little apart: distance is a form of lucidity.
One writes the world better when one keeps a little apart.
—What does translation represent in your daily life as a writer?
An exercise in humility, and the surest way to know a text. My afternoons are spent in languages: I read my sources in Latin, Greek, Italian, or German, and I also translate for pleasure and discipline — I have given a French version of Virginia Woolf and Negro Spirituals, those songs born of suffering and hope. To translate is to enter someone else's house and learn to live there without moving everything. Grace, for her part, translated my own books into English, so that our days were a long conversation between languages, around the same table and the same tea.
—What drew you to Zeno, your Renaissance alchemist?
A man who thinks alone against his time, and pays for it. The Abyss, published in 1968, follows Zeno, a physician, philosopher, and alchemist caught in the religious persecutions of his century. The title comes precisely from alchemy: the phase of dissolution, the night when matter breaks down before transforming — a fitting image for a mind that must shed all received beliefs. I claim the humanism born in the Renaissance, that faith in the dignity of man nourished by ancient texts, and Zeno is its tragic embodiment. The Prix Femina it received touched me less than knowing that readers recognized, in this distant destiny, the still-current struggle of free thought.
Freedom of thought has never had any other century than its own: the present.
—Your novels almost always delve into the past. What does the writer you are seek there?
Not a refuge, but a mirror more honest than the present. The historical novel as I understand it does not disguise the past in costumes; it restores a consciousness, with its psychological and documentary accuracy. Whether I make Hadrian speak on the threshold of death or follow Zeno under the threat of the stake, I seek the same thing: how a being thinks, doubts, and stands upright. For that, I work with ancient languages using the Greek-Latin dictionary, I verify every material detail, because a mistake in footwear betrays a mistake in the soul. The past, well questioned, sends back our own questions stripped of their noise.
—You have been warning for years about the destruction of nature. Where does this concern come from?
From a simple conviction: we live in a world that is destroying itself with a haste no century had known. As early as the seventies, I said publicly that the fate of animals and that of forests cannot be separated from reflection on man — it is all one. In The Time, That Great Sculptor, published in 1983, I wrote that nature is our mother and our sister, not our slave. I have gradually given up meat, out of conviction as much as consistency: one cannot weep over the disappearance of a species and devour it in the evening. My humanism does not stop at the borders of the human species; otherwise it would not be one.
One cannot weep over the disappearance of a species and devour it in the evening.
—Would you say that writing and caring for the natural world are, for you, the same gesture?
Absolutely, and my garden teaches me that better than my books. At Petite Plaisance, I tend it as a space for meditation as much as sustenance, attentive to the seasons, the birds, the vegetables that grow. Writing and gardening, in both cases, mean accompanying a slow transformation without claiming to command it: The Time, That Great Sculptor says that, the patient work of erosion and duration on statues as on living beings. I distrust the hurried man who thinks he possesses; I prefer the one who observes and watches. The same attention that makes me choose the right word makes me pick up a wounded bird.
—If you could imagine being read still in a century, what would you wish to leave?
Not an isolated masterpiece — I have never believed in that idol. Every work, I said to Matthieu Galey, is the result of a long inner preparation, an accumulation of readings, travels, and human experiences. If I am still read, I would like it to be for that patience, and not for the legend of the first woman received under the Dome. I would like an unknown reader, opening Memoirs of Hadrian, to feel that they are being spoken to from man to man across the centuries. The rest — prizes, green robes — belongs to time, that great sculptor, which erases names and sometimes, by chance, keeps a voice.
That an unknown reader feel they are being spoken to from man to man across the centuries.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Marguerite Yourcenar's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.