Mémoires d’Hadrien

“The gods being no more, and Christ not yet, there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment when man alone existed.” This sentence, found in Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence, gave Marguerite Yourcenar’s work its meaning and purpose, this “man alone” having determined her choice of Hadrian as her subject. “One foot in scholarship,” she said, “the other in magic, or more precisely, and without metaphor, in that sympathetic magic which consists of transporting oneself in thought into someone else,” she shaped and reshaped her portrait of the Roman emperor over twenty years, as he confides in the young Marcus Aurelius. Grounded in an intimate knowledge of the period, these letters were described by Joseph Epstein as “a triumph of historical ventriloquism.” “It is impossible,” he writes, “to read this book without thinking that if Hadrian had left memoirs, this is how they would have been written. To carry off such a novel,” he continues, “requires not only artistic talent and genuine erudition, but intelligence of the highest order.”

Taking only the rarest liberties with History, Mémoires d’Hadrien, awarded the Prix de l’Académie française, achieved worldwide success and definitively established Yourcenar’s reputation as a major writer.

Marguerite Yourcenar bequeathed all her manuscripts and correspondence to the Houghton Library at Harvard University, including the substantial Mémoires d’Hadrien dossier (ten packets of notes, a binder of notes and a complete manuscript). No literary manuscript by Yourcenar remains in private hands, and the inscriptions and letters she sent to friends and readers are today the only accessible autograph traces of her work.

A rare copy in first printing, with a signed inscription, in remarkable condition.