A Dream of Stone

by Marguerite Yourcenar, John Knight (introduction)

144 pages, Paperback

Published November 25, 2025

About the author

Marguerite Yourcenar, original name Marguerite de Crayencour, was a french novelist, essayist, poet and short-story writer who became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (French Academy), an exclusive literary institution with a membership limited to 40.
She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1947. The name “Yourcenar” is an imperfect anagram of her original name, “Crayencour.”

Yourcenar’s literary works are notable for their rigorously classical style, their erudition, and their psychological subtlety. In her most important books she re-creates past eras and personages, meditating thereby on human destiny, morality, and power. Her masterpiece is Mémoires d'Hadrien, a historical novel constituting the fictionalized memoirs of that 2nd-century Roman emperor. Her works were translated by the American Grace Frick, Yourcenar’s secretary and life companion.
Yourcenar was also a literary critic and translator.

Reviews

[Katia N]

This is another gem of ekphrasis series. On this occasion it contains five essays by Yourcenar. Her writing is like a sea wave on a quiet morning: it is gentle, but strong and totally encompassing. It comes, embraces you and then slowly retreats to free the space for a new one. Since finished reading this book I've got two more collections of her essays. So I plan to come back her work. But for now I do think I can add much more to her own words.

This is from an essay on Piranesi related to his Carceri d’Invenzione cycle:

Are we to suppose Piranesi had a conception of the same sort, the distinct vision of a universe of prisoners? For ourselves, darkened by two more centuries of human strife, we recognize only too well this limited yet infinite world in which tiny and obsessive phantoms writhe; we recognize the minds of man. We cannot help thinking of our theories, our systems, our magnificent and futile mental constructions in whose corners some victim can always be found crouching. If these Prisons, for so long relatively neglected, now attract the attention of a modern public as they do, it is perhaps not only, as Aldous Huxley has said, because this masterpiece of architectural counterpoint prefigures certain conceptions of abstract art but above all because this world, factitious and yet grimly real, claustrophobic and yet megalomaniacal, cannot fail to remind us of the one in which modern humanity imprisons itself deeper every day, and whose mortal dangers we are beginning to recognize.

In conjunction with the passage above, for those who have five minutes to spare I would recommend a visualisation on Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria channel.

It seems Yourcenar possess this very special, almost mystic clairvoyant gift to be able to write with the voice of a person gone for a very long time. Many writers of course try this but I am not aware of the others who managed to do it so naturally. I've remembered my astonishment reading Memoirs of Hadrian. There is an essay in this book 'Tone and Language in the Historical Novel' when she tries to explain how she does it. But this would be a conversation for another day. For now I just want to show another example of this magic. She writes an essay from a perspective of a few men depicted by Michelangelo in Sistine Chapel. He the Master himself addresses Gherardo Perini:

And so, you are departing. I am no longer young enough to attach importance to a separation, even if it is definitive. I know too well that the beings we love and who love us best are imperceptibly departing from us at every moment that passes. It is in this way that they part from themselves. You are sitting on this boundary stone, and you believe you are still here; but your being, already turned toward the future, no longer belongs to your life that was, and your absence has already begun. Oh, I know that all that is only an illusion like the rest, and that there is no future. Man, who invented time, then invented eternity for contrast; but the negation of time is as vain as time itself. There is no past or future, only a series of successive presents, a road perpetually destroyed and continued, upon which we all go forward.

You are sitting on this boundary stone, and you believe you are still here; but your being, already turned toward the future, no longer belongs to your life that was, and your absence has already begun.)

Another utterance she gives to Tommai dei Cavalieri, an Italian nobleman who is rumoured to be depicted as Christ in 'Last Judgement' in the Chapel:

When men contemplate my picture, they will not ask who I was or what I did: they will praise me for having existed.

This thought I find extremely poignant, even if slightly unsettling; the thought I've caught myself having so many times while looking at a portrait in a gallery or, even more often, at a photo somewhere, like this one that was lying at the middle of nowhere on a path I was walking along another day:

[Alex Sarll]

A slim, handsome collection of essays by the great novelist – bar maybe Sistine, more like a miniature of one of her great historical reimaginings/channelings, in which she ventriloquises some of Michaelangelo's muses, and for a moment almost made me forgive his utter inability convincingly to depict literally anything other than languid male flesh. Here, more than in the other pieces, I did find myself missing her usual translator (and lover) Grace Frick a little; for the non-fiction, a slight variation in Yourcenar's usual voice was only to be expected, as whose essays don't feel at least a little different to their stories? The last piece, Tone And Language In The Historical Novel, digs into exactly this, the way that a modern writer trying to work in any period before the 19th century is limited by the shortage of records of how people actually spoke, unfiltered through formal tidying. She proceeds to give examples from the most acclaimed pair of her own works, Hadrian and The Abyss, including apologies for passages which, with hindsight, ring false to her, as when she later tried translating a passage of Hadrian into Greek and found eight words wouldn't really go. Needless to say, her punctiliousness here is excessive – but also a testament to the dedication which explains why her historical novels are so good when so much of the field is so unreadably wrong. This fascination with the unrecorded aspects of the past also animates what, in isolation, would be the slightest thing here, On A Dream Of Dürer's, fascinated by a dream that really does seem simply to have been a weird dream, recorded in a time when they were more likely to be set down as allegory, prophecy &c.

So where does the stone come in? That's the opening diptych. In the first and longest essay, Yourcenar considers Piranesi and in particular his Prisons, the implications of those vast and terrible vistas, so claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time, "their intensity, their strangeness, their violence – as if struck by the rays of a black sun". But she's also fascinated by his record of Rome's ruins at a particular moment, "the site of a dialogue between the human will still inscribed in these enormous masonries, inert mineral energy, and irrevocable Time". The theme is developed in That Mighty Sculptor, Time, where she muses on how readily we think of statues as permanent, and how false that is, sculptures endlessly vulnerable to the piety, 'restoration' or simple vandalism of succeeding ages, as well as simple chance. Most resonant of all is the image of sunken ancient statues: "The forms and gestures the sculptor gave them proved to be only a brief episode between their incalculable duration as rock in the bosom of the mountain and their long existence as stone lying at the bottom of the sea."