"The Abyss" [the title of the American edition of "L'Oeuvre au noir"] is an elaborate metaphor for the emptiness of history, the vanity of power, and the grandeur and misery of men exemplary of whom is [Zeno]….

Zeno, like the kabbalistic image of the primordial man, is body, sentience, and intelligence; however Marguerite Yourcenar has not made him an Everyman, for hers is no simple-minded allegory.

Zeno is principally a physician. Although he is a master of languages and dialects, stuffed with astronomy, mechanics, engineering, mathematics, scholastic theology and canon law, philosophy and dialectics, it is as an herbalist, doctor and surgeon that we know him…. Zeno is everywhere, but not for a long enough time to persuade us that he has roots in time or place. Zeno emerges whole, or almost whole only when he narrowly escapes the inquisitorial arm of the Holy Office (who seek him for having published scandalously heretical books) and returns in disguise to spend the later part of his life as physician in a priory of Bruges, healing quietly, doing gentle good works, being circumspect, controlling his lusts and appetites, avoiding embroilment in the designs of Spanish power in the Lowlands, skirting danger. One cannot but note that it is not Zeno of Bruges who appears to interest Marguerite Yourcenar but rather the argument of an intelligence able to parse the body in its turmoil, explore the heart in its surging, explicate the mind in the midst of its anxiety and suffering. It is argument, not imagination that marks "The Abyss"…. (p. 7)

"The Abyss," unfortunately, is not level with [Marguerite Yourcenar's] earlier achievement.

It is not only that "The Abyss" is unevenly weighted, that it moves with deliberateness and machination, coincidence being too coincidental and surprise almost wholly absent. All this would be supportable if Zeno were moving to us and we felt obliged by the authority of his presence to care for him and his destiny. The difficulty is with Zeno himself. He is throughout utterly tentative, all sic et non, on the one hand and the other: pederast, but also lover of women; vegetarian, but lest he be doctrinaire, an occasional stew; taking to flight but returning; never recanting, but never defending; sympathetic to the Church, but pliant to the Reformation; hospitable to everything except stupidity.

There is one explanation for Zeno's tentativeness that a reading of Miss Yourcenar's [works supports]…. From ancient times to our own,… Stoicism has always been a splendid doctrine for non-believers. The Stoic is tentative because nothing claims him sufficiently to warrant his attachment to life at all costs. The noble temporizings of Zeno—so often wise, eloquent, even witty—are consummated in that single act to which many Stoics gave themselves with uncharacteristic decisiveness: death by one's own hand. No surprise then that condemned to be burned alive, Zeno, with surgical finesse, cuts his arteries and bleeds to death. A noble end to a life ignoble in the least, not without its fascination, instruction, daring, but also not endowed with the magic of imagination that would have compelled us of another (not particularly preferable or enviable) century to have wanted to live longer in the time of Zeno. (p. 32)