DOROTHEA STRAUS
372
aging emperor himself, experimenting with his sophisticated
senses. To my uneducated palate, the fruit tasted merely bitter.
Mter lunch, as she had promised, we looked at her postage–
stamp garden, the site of the dog cemetery, at the back of the
house. The forest crept around the sunny patch, dark and unfath–
omable, causing the frail blooms to appear valiant and transitory.
It would have been easy to miss the graves, marked by flat paving
stones, if she had not pointed them out and lovingly mentioned
each dog by name. Trier, the current companion, ran about
among the memorials to his predecessors.
My husband and I stayed until late, talking of many things,
mainly about several books underway and plans for the future.
"If time is given me," she added serenely.
Her conversation was detached; her ego required neither
adulation nor boasting to sustain it. I told her that I had been
reading her
Archives du Nord,
a memoir-biography that opens
with a sketch of Flanders in the age of the caveman. At the
advent of the late Middle Ages, Madame Yourcenar is able to
weave into her book the histories of members of her father's
Flemish-French ancestry (landowners, petty nobility,
bourgeois), with the somber earth-toned threads of an antique
tapestry, here and there effaced by age. By the nineteenth
century the memoir grows more detailed and personal, but the
book concludes with the birth of the author.
She told us that she was considering a sequel to this diptych
(the first volume, inversely, begins with her birth and travels
back a generation) "...but I will stop when I am fifteen," she said,
"no one should attempt to write about himself beyond that age,
one becomes self-conscious, the temptation to embellish is too
strong-and, after all, is it so important?"
When we left, she accompanied us to the entrance. She had
thrown a thin white wool scarf over her head, protection against
the cool Maine evening. Now she resembled a monument to the
European immigrant. Yet she could not be regarded as an exile.
French (the first woman to be admitted to their Academy),
Belgian, New England townswoman, world traveler-she was all
of these, and none. Her country lay in the rich and varied pro–
duce of her prose.
Marguerite Yourcenar has died. Like the Emperor Hadrian,
she suffered from vascular disease and, like him, also, I am cer-
