protagonists—can be considered from so many different angles the whole can never be fully assembled or understood. The characters become obscured by the complexity of their natures. Whether or not each recognizes it, the only true reality, the only permanence in an ephemeral world, is found in the unchanging nature of dreams.

Coup de Grâce shows the same purity of narration and the same density of style as Alexis. Eric, the first-person narrator, demands from life the ideal, even harsh, purity of love as well as courage and self-sacrifice. Whereas Alexis becomes gay out of veneration for women, Eric’s preference is caused much less by a love for men than by his desire to remain alone and uncommitted. Like many of Yourcenar’s heroes, he is unwilling to compromise with his emotions, often preferring the darker side of love to the blandness of mediocrity, and he sees in death a fitting end that is both a glorification and a promotion.

Yourcenar’s drama has received less acclaim from critics and public than her fictional creations. Her drama uses traditional form, and she revives ancient times without the necessary modernization of characters and response to contemporary sensibility. Her plays, however, offer another dimension to her art and a more immediate, visual presentation of her philosophical concerns and her interpretation of the human condition.

Especially known for her fictional works, Yourcenar has written numerous essays as well, which deal with a range of topics reflecting her broad intellectual curiosity. These essays too show the same incisive mind and ease of style already evident in her creative endeavors and have helped to shape her worldview. Yourcenar’s observations on different religious philosophies and her literary commentaries further illuminate understanding of her thought. Many of her essays have been republished in book form in France and are available in English translation.

Memoirs of Hadrian

First published: Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1951 (English translation, 1954; also as Hadrian’s Memoirs, 1957)

Type of work: Novel

Approaching death, the Roman emperor reminisces about the important events of his public and private life.

Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian has often been called a historical novel, but strictly speaking it is not, since it rejects the use of local color, period dress, and period customs found, for example, in the works of Sir Walter Scott or Alexandre Dumas, père.

The novel is divided into six parts, with Latin titles taken from Hadrian’s poetry, philosophical ideas, or coins minted during his reign, and describes different phases of the emperor’s life. The narrative traces a slowly rising curve with its apex reached at the time of Hadrian’s greatest happiness, the result of his passionate love and extraordinary successes. This euphoria is followed immediately by a downward slope, at the bottom of which the emperor is overcome with doubt and despair; however, despite this depression, he courageously embarks on a new beginning. The work is addressed to Marcus Aurelius in the form of a letter, which allows for the use of the autobiographical first person favored by Yourcenar as being closest to the human voice. Knowing that his death is near, Hadrian sets down, in his most truthful manner, at risk of shocking or not being understood, the important personal and public events of his sixty-odd years, along with his meditations on politics, the arts, and the world.

Yourcenar portrays a great historical figure who, thanks to his broad humanist education and inquiring intelligence, dominated his life and times with objectivity and lucidity. Hadrian, an art lover, poet, tireless traveler, general, economist, master builder, and political scientist, is a man who mistrusts conventional formulas and is more interested in observing than in judging. His generous nature leads him to improve the status of slaves, although he suspects that slavery will never be abolished, since other, more insidious forms of enslavement, just as inhuman, will simply take its place.

Acknowledging that his role is to impose Greek thought in all human endeavors, the emperor seeks to create a universe of perfect harmony and beauty under Rome’s might and majesty. Violence and war represent for him the greatest evils, and peace and liberty the requirements necessary for civilization. Furthermore, the collaboration of intelligence and work in such a beneficial environment will bring happiness to all.

Although Yourcenar does not describe the past in the light of the present, she does show that the period of Hadrian’s rule was very similar to her own time by portraying a highly sophisticated, complex, and skeptical emperor who reveals all the aspects of his political and emotional life. Hadrian characterizes himself partly through accounts of his actions, more often through analyses of his thoughts and feelings. Yourcenar’s character fits so well with the known facts of the actual Hadrian, and is so subtly portrayed, the fictional persona takes on a reality that seems to explain the actual Hadrian. With a talent that gives the novelist precedence over the historian and the moralist, and the philosopher precedence over the novelist, Yourcenar brilliantly revived a conception of a man and a life at the end of a great civilization.

The Abyss

First published: L’uvre au noir, 1968 (English translation, 1976; also as Zeno of Bruges, 1994)

Type of work: Novel

Obsessed with accumulating knowledge and endowed with free will, Zeno fears being entrapped by complacent ways of seeing and thinking.

Like Yourcenar’s previous works, The Abyss re-creates an era, with its particular modes of thinking and being. The action occurs between 1510 and 1569 in Europe, mainly in the Belgian city of Bruges, and is divided into three parts, the first two echoing each other (“Wandering Life” and “Immobile Life”) and the third (“The Prison”) describing the site of the hero’s last months and serving as a metaphor for his body and the world.

Zeno, whose name is the same as the Greek philosopher’s and whose name is associated with “zero” and “no,” learned ancient languages, natural sciences, and alchemy at a young age. He quickly realizes, however, that men and books lie. A universal man of the Renaissance, he invents a weaving machine, discusses the atoms of Epicurus and the proofs demonstrating God’s existence, and refuses a priori the authority of scholars. He is interested in geology and botany, medicine and surgery, and astronomy and metallurgy.

After some thirty years of wandering under assumed names, one step ahead of the Inquisition, he returns to Bruges, where he becomes a physician at a hospital run by Franciscans. The good and learned prior of the Franciscans and Zeno have daily conversations about religion and questions of faith as well as about the deteriorating situation in Flanders, repression of the patriots, and the torture and killing of Protestants and Catholics alike. Thus, the prior’s Christian wisdom complements Zeno’s secular wisdom.

Arrested for his sympathy to the rebels’ cause and for his blasphemous writings, Zeno defends himself before the tribunal, arguing about physiology and physics, rejecting unscientific hypotheses and conclusions. Ultimately, he is condemned because he instinctively knows that there can be no accommodation between those who seek truth and those who want to impose their viewpoints by force of will. Afraid to burn at the stake, Zeno chooses suicide. This suicide is more than a revolt against the Christian prohibition of the deed or the uniquely free act of an existential negator. By sacrificing his life, Zeno attains the supreme freedom offered by eternity.

Despite its French title, the novel is not concerned with the transformation of base metals but with the quest for knowledge devoid of falsehood, superstition, fear, and ignorance. This search for the absolute distinguishes Zeno from other scientists and makes him a universal man, lucid in his thinking and unwilling to accept fanaticism, whether philosophical, scientific, moral, or religious. More interested in negating so as better to reaffirm, he discovers that in addition to ridding himself of all prejudices and preconceptions, he must achieve a broadening of the self and of the understanding by which one becomes integrated into the universe.

In illustrating and analyzing her hero’s difficult progress, Yourcenar shows that any seeker of truth defies established values and must be destroyed by defenders of the status quo. It is not surprising, then, that Zeno, when forced to choose, would much prefer death to life in the horror of the human condition.

“An Obscure Man”

First published: “Un Homme obscur,” 1982 (collected in Two Lives and a Dream, 1987)

Type of work: Short story

The protagonist, too sensitive for his time, slowly discovers that humanity is alone in a purposeless universe.

Based on Yourcenar’s earlier story, “D’après Rembrandt” (1934; after Rembrandt), “An Obscure Man,” published in the collection Comme l’eau qui coule (1982; Two Lives and a Dream, 1987), describes the life and travels of Nathanaël. In the process he steeps himself in the classics, medieval tales, and plays by William Shakespeare while living the life dictated by his surroundings, whether in the relative refinement of Europe or the wilderness of the New World. In spite, or perhaps because, of his varied experiences in these settings, he only incompletely understands life, viewing existence in impressionistic fashion, as if his thought barely touches reality. Thus the author’s recurrent theme of an absurd world in which human destiny is directed as much by chance as by free will emerges.

In Amsterdam, Nathanaël works in his uncle’s print shop, where he continues his self-teaching by reading Greek and Roman texts. He compares the societies of Greece and Rome to his and sees with despair the religious, political, social, and economic injustice of his time. Although he fully embraces the grandeur of Christian principles, he rejects dogma and conventional religion as nonsense. Such conflicts between society’s expectations and individual passions resurface repeatedly throughout Yourcenar’s work, and they are resolved in large measure as a result of the strength of the protagonist’s personality.

Nathanaël falls in love with, marries, and is soon rejected by Saraï, a honky-tonk singer and prostitute. Then, through a series of events, he finds himself as game warden for a wealthy philanthropist, sailing to his employer’s island property. When he overhears that his wife has been hanged for stealing, he cries out her name, and then God’s, repeatedly, with no answer. All alone, he becomes a thing among things, merging with the night. Nathanaël now knows, regardless of the old philosopher’s wish “to give at least the appearance of order to chaos,” that God or the Self or Nothingness is not at the center of the universe, that ultimately all, including humankind, is guided not by design, but by accident, and that he will die soon like the other creatures around him.

Far from being the failure suggested by the title, Nathanaël succeeds, like the majority of Yourcenar’s heroes, in imposing his own view of the world, in this case through conscious open-eyed acceptance of the Self. Thanks to his sensitivity, to his love for plants, trees, birds, and animals, to his gentleness, and to his refusal to act according to preconceptions or judgmental ideas, his life can be considered successful because he has evolved the peace of mind and acceptance of cosmic darkness that others, powerful and weak alike, have been unable or unwilling to acquire.