There is nothing more easily destroyed than the equilibrium of the fairest places. A text remains intact regardless of our whims of interpretation, and survives our commentaries; but the slightest imprudence inflicted upon stone, the shortest macadamized road cut through a field where grass has peacefully grown for centuries, does something irreparable, and for ever. The beauty goes, and the authenticity likewise.]
* Addition of 1958.
There are places where one has chosen to live, invisible abodes which one makes for oneself quite outside the current of time. I have lived in Tibur, and shall die there, perhaps, as Hadrian did on Achilles’ Isle.
No. Once more I have gone back to the Villa, to its garden pavillions built for privacy and for repose, to the vestiges of a luxury free of pomp, and as little imperial as possible, conceived of rather for the wealthy connoisseur who tries to combine the pleasures of art with the charms of rural life. In the Pantheon I have watched for the exact spot where sunlight would fall on a morning of April 21, and along the Mausoleum’s halls have retraced that funeral path so often walked by the friends of the emperor’s last days, Chabrias, Diotimus, and Celer. But I have ceased to feel the immediate presence of those beings, the living reality of those events; they are near me still, but of the past, neither more nor less now than the memories of my own life. Our commerce with others does not long endure; it ceases once satisfaction is obtained, the lesson learned, the service rendered, the book complete. What I could say has been said; what I could learn has been learned. Let us turn, for the time that is left to us, to other work.
N 258
ISBN 0-374-5-0348.6
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Memoirs of Hadrian
Followed by Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian
Translated from the French by GRACE FRICK in collaboration with the Author
This novel, unique in its approach to a figure from Roman history, has had international acclaim from the time that it first appeared, in France. It has already been translated into fourteen languages of Europe and Asia. Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, the work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and by his contemporaries, both friends and enemies. In a prose as firm as that of the great Latin stylists of his time, Hadrian’s arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, his gradual re-ordering of a war-torn world are reconstructed with an imaginative insight which only years in the company of the Emperor could give.
Marguerite Yourcenar writes only in French. She is the author of some fifteen books varying in range from art and literary criticism to novels historical and modern, and to drama, poetry, and translation (from English and from ancient and modern Greek). As widely travelled as the Emperor of whom she writes, she was born in Brussels of French parents and has lived in several countries of Europe, but is now an American citizen, making her home since 1950 on Mount Desert Island, Maine.
In January 1981, Mme Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the prestigious French Academy, a measure of the extraordinary place she holds in the history of French letters.
Illustrated with over 40 photographs especially chosen by the author FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX, 19 Union Square West, New York 10003