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emperor. Her choice of subject is lesssurprising than it might at first seem.Having been trained in Greek andLatin by private tutors she felt athome in the classical world and all themore drawn to it by this sentence shefound in Flaubert's correspondence:"Just when the gods had ceased to be,and the Christ had not yet come, therewas a unique moment in history,between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius,when man stood alone." Ultimately,Marguerite Yourcenar would "do,from within, the same work ofreconstruction which the 19thcentury archaeologists (had) donefrom without."

Yet even though author and subjectmade a good match, 28 years were topass before her self-assigned task wascompleted. Throughout this periodher readings in the Greek and Romanclassics remained nearly continuous,whereas her efforts at the writingtable were fitful at best. Because itwas her practice to destroy almosteverything she wrote just as soon asshe found it displeasing, she neverhad more than a few scraps to buildpn, or to sustain the hope that sheactually did have a book in hand.Though she does not report howmany manuscripts, whether partial orcomplete, she simply threw out, it isclear there must have been a fairnumber. Nevertheless she found thecourage to begin work from scratchover and over again, despite years ofblundering down blind alleys.Eventually, though, and perhapsinevitably, she scraped bottom. "From1939 to 1948 the project was whollyabandoned. I thought of it at times,but with discouragement, and almostindifference, as one thinks of theimpossible. And with something likeshame for ever having ventured uponsuch an undertaking (Reflections,p.323)." It was during this period thatshe went to the length of burning herresearch notes: "They seemed to havebecome ... completely useless."

But then by chance this rumor of awould-be book returned to life inDecember 1948. While rooting aboutin a trunkful of half-forgottenbelongings she hadn't seen in 10years, she came upon "four or fivetypewritten sheets, the paper ofwhich had turned yellow." Here was afragment, indeed one of the very few,to have survived her ruthlessrejections, and "from that momentthere was no question but that thisbook must be taken up again,

whatever the cost." How many woulddare to resume work at age 45 on aproject first conceived at age 20 whenrepeated efforts during theintervening 25 years had ledabsolutely nowhere at all?

Philosophers of craft distinguishbetween the patience of waiting andthe patience of doing. In writingMemoirs of Hadrian MargueriteYourcenar demonstrated a rarecapacity for patience of both kinds.While waiting she learned todiscriminate between the vision of thebook she might at long last write andher failed attempts to realize thatvision which had to be discarded. Byremaining clear about this distinctionshe managed to spare the baby. It wasonly the bath water that got thrownout. Endowed as well with thepatience of doing, she never quitwriting altogether, with the result thatby the time she had matured to thedegree her subject required, she hadperfected a style exactly suited to herneeds.

After nearly 60 years at thetypewriter, Marguerite Yourcenarwon unforeseen fame when inJanuary 1981 she was elected to theAcademie Francaise. She is the firstwoman to be so honored, and itredounds to the credit of her Frenchpeers that in breaking with a traditionof more than three hundred years'·standing they could bring themselvesto accept as one of their own acandidate who happened also to be anAmerican citizen.·Madame Yourcenarhas lived in this country since the late1930s, having been stranded here bythe war. Though she writes only inFrench and primarily for a Frenchaudience, she has been translated byher companion, the late Grace Frick,so that American readers have readyaccess to her principal works. Itremains for her adopted country totake due notice.

Since 1950 Madame Yourcenar haslived on Mt. Desert Island down eastoff the coast of Maine. For 31 yearsthe local press had left her in peace,but her election to the Academie wasthought to make good copy.Overnight she became every editor'sfirst priority for an interview, andfinding myself in Maine at the time Ivolunteered. From the first I hadmisgivings about the assignmentbecause the editor was emphatic inprofessing his total lack of interest inanything to do with her work. Whathis readers would want to find out, he

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warned, was the name of her dog andhow her roses were doing. I wentthrough with the interviewnevertheless because Memoirs ofHadrian was a book of specialimportance to me, having served as akind of preparation for the study ofMontaigne. The opportunity to meetthe author was not to be passed up,for there was reason to hope that aninterview might yield a clue to thesource of her exemplary patience. SoI set out for Northeast Harbor.

Of all the villages on the mussel-bound coast of Maine, NortheastHarbor strikes me as being among theleast likely to attract a writer of anykind, let alone a European as cerebral •

as Marguerite Yourcenar. As summercolonies go, it is one of the mostheavily moneyed, which in Maine issaying rather a lot, and during theseason it teems with expensivePhiladelphians, few of them muchinclined toward ideas or books. YetNortheast Harbor is home to MadameYourcenar where she lives in a small.white house which she calls "PetitePlaisance," the name originally givento a nearby island by the Frenchexplorer, Champlain. "You can liveyour own life here," she told me, herpiercing eyes illuminating athoroughly French face. "I like theprivacy, but I also like living in avillage. You can learn so much more

Continued on page 45NOVEMBER 1986 35

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about people and human nature here- who's getting married, who's gettingdivorced, who's going to have a baby- than you can leading an upper crustexistence in some big city." Possiblyso, though it comforts me that I amnot the only one from "away," as theMainers put it, who finds the nativessomewhat baffling. In a neighboringvillage Madame was once overheardto sigh, "I have not zee key to zeesepeepul."What Marguerite Yourcenar has

instead is zee key to the world ofclassical antiquity, and it is herseemingly total embrace of theGraeco-Roman view of life that turnedout to be the clue I was seeking. Wetalked about her work, her travels,her election to the Academie, and soon, covering all the topics common tointerviews of this sort. But monthswere to pass before I realized thatalong the way she had told me what Ihad most wanted to know. Havinghad no occasion to call on her since, Icannot say whether she would agreewith my conjectures, but I amconfident that she would not dismissthem out of hand.

Early in the interview I askedMadame Yourcenar whether she everfelt surprised at having spent morethan half her adult life on an island off·the coast of Maine, the only Frenchwriter of her generation, or perhapsof any other, to have met with thatimprobable fate, "Surprised?" saidshe. "Mais non. We don't like to admithow important it is, but everything isinfluenced by chance. Getting bookswritten is a matter of chance." Itstruck me at first that this was anextraordinary remark for her tomake, that her modesty wasaltogether excessive. But later Irealized that she meant what she hadsaid, and not only because it hadindeed been a piece of luck that sheshould have found a fragment ofmanuscript in a half-forgotten trunkwhile looking for something else.Without that stimulus she might neverhave resumed work. Yet there stillseemed reason to wonder why, givenher demonstrated capacity forpersevering labor, she should havebeen quite so ready to profess arespect for chance.

Toward the end of our conversationI asked how it happened that the firsttwo or three chapters of Memoirs read

as if they might have been written byMontaigne. Flattery was not myintention. Anyone who cares to readthese books side by side will soon notethat the prevailing tone of The Essays,especially of the later ones, seems toreverberate through the openingchapters of Memoirs, and thisarresting similarity of mood hadhooked my curiosity. MadameYourcenar was by no meansdispleased with this comparison, butbeing French through and throughshe assumed without hesitation thatfor un Americain Montaigne could notpossibly be more than a mere name.She thereupon proceeded to sling mea lecture on the who and what ofMontaigne, and on the whole she didrather well - a bit vague, perhaps,about some of the biographical detail,but it was nevertheless clear that shedid know The Essays. Yet thisfamiliarity, as it turns out, proves notto be the reason Memoirs is redolentof Montaigne. My question had simplybeen obtuse. In direct answer to it sheexplained: "We are both immersed inthe classical world."

So that - obviously - was theconnection. As a thoroughgoingclassicist, like Montaigne before her,she had taken the Graeco-Romanview of life for her own, and central tothat view is a respect for Fortune, orwhat she chose to call chance. Thissentiment figures prominently in TheEssays:

Good and bad luck are in myopinion two sovereignpowers. It is unwise to think

that human wisdom can fill the role ofFortune. And vain is the undertakingof him who presumes to embrace bothcauses and consequences and to leadby the hand the progress of his affair... I will say more, that even ourwisdom and deliberation for the mostpart follow the lead of chance. My willand my reasoning are moved now inone way, now in another, and thereare many of those movements that aredirected without me. My reason hasaccidental impulsions that changefrom day to day. (The Essays,III:8:713, Donald Frame trans.)

These passages should make itclear that the Fortune Montaignelearned to respect and trust hadnothing to do with the superstitions oflate Roman times. As the empiredisintegrated, Fortune became a cultand the mindless, passive fatalismthus engendered gave her a bad namethat was to last a thousand years untilshe was rehabilitated during theRenaissance. Montaigne andMarguerite Yourcenar concernedthemselves with a much earlier periodof Roman history, a time "when manstood alone," when it was necessaryto confront the randomness of lifewithout the comfort of belief in DivinePurpose and ultimate salvation, whenthe notion of Fate had not yet lapsedinto fatalism. The Romans of that era,who were able to accept thedemonstrable importance of Fortunewithout disavowing the individual'sresponsibility, were fond of thesaying: Each man's character shapeshis fortune. For her part MadameYourcenar expresses the same viewin her autobiographical ruminati9ns,W'ith Open Eyes: "I do not believe inan irrevocable, fore-ordained destiny:We change our destinies constantly aswe make our way through life.Everything that we do affects our fatefor better or worse."

Perhaps the surest, most direct wayto affect fate is to accept the reality ofit in the first place, to strive for a fullawareness of Fortune and theinfluence of the random on humanhopes and plans. Such acceptance, Iwould speculate, fosters patience ofthe kind that has sustained MargueriteYourcenar in a very long literarycareer. The link is to be found in aparadox. The more wholeheartedlyyou acknowledge the importance ofFortune, the less you will expect ofyour own unaided efforts, and theselowered expectations will in turnbecome a source of perseverance. Toassume instead that a desiredoutcome is and has to be entirely upto you can lead to swift and terminaldiscouragement. For if you alone are·to determine the results of yourefforts, you would probably be wise toabandon them the first time they fail."When it comes to making a book,"Madame Yourcenar observes, "you'vegot to know how to wait." The samelesson would apply to judge from herexample, when it comes to making alife. •

NOVEMBER 1986 45