Imaginary interview with Marguerite Yourcenar
by Charactorium · Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 — 1987) · Literature · 5 min read
It is in the garden of Petite Plaisance, in Northeast Harbor, on a misty summer morning in 1977, that Grace Frick finds Marguerite sitting near the flowerbeds they have tended together for forty years. Sparrows sing, a cup of tea cools on the wooden table. Grace, exhausted by illness but undeterred from work, arrives with the pages of a translation in progress—and the desire, that day, to question the woman before the work.
—Marguerite, I see that old trunk opened right here, in 1948, and those forgotten sheets. What came back to you when you found them?
You were there, Grace, you remember the dust and that handwriting I almost didn't recognize. I had begun to make Hadrian speak in the twenties, then I gave up, convinced you don't write an emperor's voice at twenty-five. Opening those pages, I understood that twenty years of reading, grief, and travel had finally made me worthy of him. It was no longer about imagining a Roman, but about drawing as close as possible to a man watching his own death approach. I could not have written that book earlier. I had to grow older so that he could grow older in me.
I had to grow older so that Hadrian could grow older in me.
—You spent hours on those Roman coins and dragged me all the way to Villa Adriana, in Tivoli. What were you looking for so precisely?
A face, first. The coins bearing Hadrian's image, which I turned between my fingers, gave me the curve of a nose, the weariness of a gaze better than any description. At Tivoli, before those collapsed walls, I walked where he had wanted to gather his whole world—Egypt, Greece, his memories. You don't invent an emperor: you wait for him in the places he loved, you stay silent until he consents to speak. Historical truth is not a backdrop you apply; it is a presence you tame. Without those stones and medals, Memoirs of Hadrian would have been just a beautiful exercise. With them, I could honestly write in the first person.
You don't invent an emperor: you wait for him in the places he loved.
—Long before me, in 1929, you published Alexis. Why that first book under a name that wasn't quite yours?
Yourcenar is almost an anagram of Crayencour, my real name—a game my father and I had traced together, moving letters like shuffling cards. I needed that distance. Alexis or the Treatise of the Vain Struggle is the confession of a man who tells his wife what he is, and who chooses to leave rather than lie. Under my family name, such frankness would have seemed a family scandal; under Yourcenar, it became a work. The pseudonym does not hide the author, it frees him. It allowed me to write the truth of others without being asked immediately if it was mine.
The pseudonym does not hide the author, it frees him.
—This subject of confession, of love one dares not name—you who have confided it to me so often—was it already, in 1929, a way of speaking about yourself?
You ask the question no one else would dare, and that is why I answer you. I have never written a disguised confession; Alexis is not my diary. But one writes well only what one understands from the inside, and I knew very early that hearts do not line up according to conventions. Making a man in love with another man speak, in 1929, in a classical and restrained language, was to affirm that such humanity deserved the same dignity of style as any other. You, who have shared my life for so long, know that I have never liked masks—except those that, in the theater, speak the truth louder than faces.
Hearts do not line up according to conventions.
—Your mornings begin at dawn, with a walk and the birds, before the desk. What has this house in Maine given to your work?
Silence, first, and slowness. Petite Plaisance looks unassuming—a wooden house, books to the ceiling—but it is here that I wrote the essential. I get up before daybreak, I walk along the paths watching the sparrows and ferns as a naturalist would watch her plates. Then I sit down, and the morning hours are the only truly fruitful ones. Mount Desert Island has kept me far from salons, fashions, the noise of Paris. People think I am in exile; I am at home wherever I can work. This American house is, deep down, the most European place I know, for all the spirit and memory it shelters.
People think I am in exile; I am at home wherever I can work.
—Our evenings, I often spend on your pages, turning them into English. What does this work we share mean to you?
More than you imagine, Grace. You have been my first reader and my first English translator, and there is no judgment I fear and hope for more than yours. To translate is to read with one's hands: you touch each sentence, you test its weight, you force me to say why one word and not another. Our evenings, around a lamp, discussing an adjective for an hour, have been a true school for me. I myself have translated negro spirituals and Virginia Woolf, and I know what that fidelity demands. What we do together in the evening will appear in no preface—and yet that is where my books take on their second life.
To translate is to read with one's hands.
—You gradually gave up meat, you are alarmed by the fate of animals and forests. Where does this concern for the living world come from?
It comes from the same place as everything else: from attention. When you have spent your life trying to understand an emperor dead for eighteen centuries, you learn that nothing is foreign to man—neither the animal he kills, nor the tree he fells. I stopped eating those creatures the day I could no longer look away. Our era destroys the living with a haste no century has known, and they call it progress. Nature is not our servant; it is our origin and our kin. This conviction is not a fad: it is the simplest extension of my humanism. You cannot respect man if you despise what breathes around him.
Nature is not our servant; it is our origin and our kin.
—For many, defending animals and the writer of Hadrian seem like two different women. How, in you, do these two concerns come together?
They have never been two. Hadrian, Zeno, the alchemist of my The Abyss, are men who seek to see clearly, not to lie about the human condition. But to see clearly today is to observe that man poisons the water he drinks and the air he breathes. My reflection on history and my vigilance for the earth proceed from the same refusal of blindness. I have always thought that each being is responsible for the whole of the living—that he has it in his charge like a deposit. Writing about vanished civilizations and pleading for those being destroyed is the same gesture. The past I resurrect and the future that worries me speak of one and the same thing: the fragility of what we have received.
Each being has the charge of the living like a deposit.
—It is whispered that a woman might one day enter the Dome. What do you think of this institution that refers to its members only in the masculine?
I am as amused as I am wary. The Académie française, founded in 1635, calls its members Immortels, and some seriously maintain that the statutes do not provide for Immortelles—as if grammar could bar the way to intelligence. I have never sought honors; I live too far and too willingly on the margins for that. But the idea that an assembly devoted to letters should close itself to women on the grounds of an adjective agreement has something both comic and revealing. If such a door were to open one day, I do not think it should be seen as a personal triumph. It would above all be a sign that an old house finally consents to recognize what it should have admitted long ago.
As if grammar could bar the way to intelligence.
—And if this honor came to find you here, in this Maine where you are happy far from Paris, would you accept it?
The question troubles me more than you think. I have built my life on distance—that of the ocean, that of the centuries I question. Accepting a seat under the Dome would mean returning, at least symbolically, to a France I left in order to observe it better. And yet I do not disdain what it would signify. Not for me, who has nothing left to prove, but for all those who write and have never been counted among the living of letters. If I were to enter, I would want to bring my dead, my emperors, my alchemists, and this land of Maine that you helped me love. One does not enter such a house alone: one enters with all that one has traversed.
One does not enter such a house alone: one enters with all that one has traversed.
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.