![]() His life, he says, seems to him “a shapeless mass,” but in this memoir he will try to make some sense of it. As the book opens, Hadrian is sixty and dying. The novel took the form of a lengthy letter written by the aged and ill Hadrian to the 17-year-old but already thoughtful Marcus Aurelius. This extraordinary chance event marked the beginning of the rewriting of Mémoires d’Hadrien, which was finally completed and published in 1951. From that moment t here was no question but that this book must be taken up again, whatever the cost”. ![]() It was several minutes before I remembered that Marc stood here for Marcus Aurelius, and that I had in hand a fragment of the lost manuscript. Youcernar recounts in her “ Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian”: “I could not recall the name at all. While throwing the letters mechanically into the fire, she came upon some pages that started with the line “ Mon cher Marc” (My dear Mark). The box contained lots of family papers, old letters and an accumulation of correspondence with people she had forgotten, most of which ended up in the fireplace. On a cold day in December 1948 (or January 1949), Youcernar, now aged 46, received a trunk from Switzerland full of personal effects she had left in Europe. Renaissance copy of a bronze head of Antinous, probably executed at the time of Cosimo I before 1574, National Archaeological Museum of Florence, Italy. She entered a long period of uncertainty and abandoned her literary ambitions going as far as burning all her notes. When WWII broke out in 1939, she exiled herself to the United States, armed only with some notes made at Yale, a map of the Roman Empire at the time of Trajan’s death and a postcard of the bronze head of Antinous from the Archaeological Museum in Florence. It was at this time that she started writing the first lines of the manuscript, including the opening scene of the novel about Hadrian’s visit to his physician Hermogenes. Sh e undertook extensive reading in the libraries of Yale University in order to expand her knowledge of classical antiquity. She resumed her historical researches between 19 while on a trip to the United States. The manuscript was rejected by Fasquelle and destroyed by the author. Two years after her visit to Tivoli, Yourcenar wrote a dialogue entitled “Antinoos” and submitted it to the publisher Fasquelle. The writing of Mémoires d’Hadrien was not going to be an easy task. Marguerite Yourcenar visiting Villa Adriana in Tivoli on her 21st birthday, June 8, 1924. ![]() But it was not before she visited Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli in 1924 that the young Marguerite, who was 21 years old at the time, decided to write about the emperor Hadrian. A poem, “L’Apparition”, probably written when she was 16, features a statue of Antinous in the gardens at Tivoli. It begins in 1915 when Yourcenar, as a 12-year-old girl, visits the British Museum and sees for the first time the bronze head of Hadrian which had been recovered from the River Tames. The story between Hadrian and Yourcenar is a long and fascinating one that lasted some 36 years before Mémoires d’Hadrien finally got published. ![]() It is the first exhibition in France about Mémoires d’Hadrien. Fifty works are on loan from the Louvre, the British Museum, Hadrian’s Villa, the Museum Ingres in Montauban, the Gallo-Roman Museum of Lyon and the Musée Saint-Raymond in Toulouse. On display are books, manuscript, statuary, portrait busts, coins as well as different artefacts from the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. It provides insight into the meticulous work behind Yourcenar’s historic novel, compiling postcards and photographs of works and places relating to her subject, studying all the ancient sources with a passionate enthusiasm. The exhibition sheds light on the genesis of Mémoires d’Hadrien and presents archaeological objects and ancient texts. The Forum Antique de Bavay, located in northern France, is currently hosting a small exhibition devoted to the book Mémoires d’Hadrien (Memoirs of Hadrian), a novel by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Hadrian. ![]()
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