Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist, essayist, poet, and translator who became the first woman elected to the Académie française in 1980. No, I’m not kidding. Her full name was Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour; “Yourcenar” began as a pen name and an imperfect anagram of “Crayencour.” It became her legal name after she took U.S. citizenship in 1947.
Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) is Yourcenar’s most famous work: a fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor Hadrian (r. 117–138 CE), presented as a long letter he writes to his successor Marcus Aurelius, while near death (no one cares of Antoninus Pius who reigned between them, let’s face it). What’s interesting for us is that Adrian, among many other things, was a builder: the Pantheon as we actually know it is substantially his, along with the wall across northern Britain that still carries his name, and the vast, strange villa at Tivoli where he spent his final years assembling, in stone, quotations from every place the empire had shown him. A canal referencing the Nile at Canopus, colonnades echoing something he’d admired in Athens, an entire landscape built as a kind of physical anthology of a life that was, by the time he built it, mostly already behind him. Most builders build toward a future they expect to occupy. Hadrian, in Yourcenar’s telling, built toward a past he was actively in the process of losing, and knew it.
He states his own theory of the two different acts plainly.
“To build is to collaborate with the earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby… To reconstruct is to collaborate with time gone by, penetrating or modifying its spirit, and carrying it toward a longer future.”
Building looks forward, toward a landscape that didn’t yet carry your mark. Reconstruction looks backward, into a spirit that already existed, and asks what continuing it actually requires. Hadrian, uniquely among this month’s builders, understood himself to be doing both at once, in the same villa, often in the same wall, putting a new mark on the Tivoli hillside while simultaneously reconstructing, stone by stone, a set of places and moments he already knew he’d never properly have again.
In what’s way more than an emperor’s biography of architectural ambition is how Yourcenar has Hadrian apply the same reasoning to himself. In the chapter titled Animula Vagula Blandula, quoting one of Hadrian’s own poems, he reflects on his own ageing, and he says something along the lines of: “Already certain portions of my life are like dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy in its entirety.” This is a man who has spent his reign dismantling and reassembling stone across an empire, turning that exact experience on his own body and memory. He is, by his own description, already partly a ruin: rooms of himself closed off, no longer inhabited, abandoned, long before death arrives to make the ruin official.
This is interesting, in our week that’s mostly been asking what a ruin does for the people around it: it was proof of continuity for Herbert, a hollow institution for Cavafy, a moral obligation for Michaels. Yourcenar’s Hadrian adds the case none of the others quite reach: the ruin experienced from the inside, by the person still occupying it, while it’s happening. He isn’t mourning a building that’s already fallen: he’s narrating, in real time and with wise clarity, the process by which his own faculties, memories, and eventually his body are being dismantled the same way an abandoned wing of a palace gets that way: not all at once, not through any single catastrophic event, but floor by floor, shop after shop.
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