Dorothea Straus
PETITE PLAISANCE
"You will recognize my house by the sign,
Petite
Plaisance,
and by the fields in front of it," said the writer,
Marguerite Yourcenar, when she gave my husband, Roger
Straus, her American publisher, instructions for our visit.
Petite Plaisance:
the name sounded at once regal and casual,
and combined with the vision of a sweep of acres, it conjured up
in my mind's eye a picture of one of those purportedly small
chateaus, like the photographs that used to hang in the compart–
ments of the French trains in my childhood.
It
would be my first
meeting with Madame Yourcenar, and from her books it seemed
fitting to find her in a dwelling only slightly less splendid than
the palace of a king-a royal retreat like Josephine Bonaparte's
Malmaison
or the
Petit Trianon
of Marie Antionette. For her writ–
ings are aristocratic, self-assured, products of an old culture and
scholarship, each book bearing the stamp of a rightful monarch
of letters.
But Marguerite Yourcenar (the pen name is an acronym
from the original, de Crayencour), born in Brussels of a Belgian
mother and a French father, no longer lived in Europe. She had
been relocated for many years at Mount Desert Island, Maine. So
our pilgrimage there was thronged with the usual summer
weekend travellers to New England. At take-off at Bar Harbor, the
local, one-engine propeller plane sputtered and coughed as if to
shatter its rickety sides. But just as an ancient servitor resists re–
tirement and relegation to a nursing home, faced with its in–
evitable end in the junkyard, the taxi plane rose haltingly off the
ground. There was no
post chaise
nor carapisoned horses to take
us to
Petite Plaisance.
Following Marguerite Yourcenar's directions, my husband
and I walked along the street of her town in search of
Petite
Plaisance.
We passed the usual village shops and the modest
homes, each with its parsimonious allotment of front lawn. At
