Status Updates From Marguerite Yourcenar

So it was that in one month , just barely , Yourcenar wrote the initial version of a short novel — a hundred pages or so — that she would finish in Sorrento in August of the same year : Coup de Grâce , Even her fiercest detractors or perhaps especially they— " rescue " this little text , a dry and violent one, from an œuvre they judge in the main to be "pompous” and "overdone”.

The young woman that Yourcenar was when she wrote Pindare made some astonishingly premonitory remarks .Through Pindar, she sketched something of a self-portrait of the old woman she would become: It is toward the end , in the formless writing on the final pagespages ,that intimate tastes and torments are revealed. Regret : that remembrance of desire.

We find many more traces in Pindare of what was to be Yourcenar's universe , her thought , and even her style . We can glean a few aphorisms from Pindare that Yourcenar would be attached to all her life : "He was reaching the age where egoism is as much a virtue as it is a necessity“.

Some might well be surprised to find such a very young woman of that era travelling. hat historical moment (and modes of conduct) still wavered between the 19th & the 20th centuries. Yourcenar wrote: Wherever one goes, falsehood reigns. In the 20th century, which is crude, garish and loud, it most frequently takes the form of imposture; in the 19th century, a more subdues age, it took the form of hypocrisy