For Yourcenar, a republication became the occasion for rewriting her text, so a new edition was frequently a new book. From these experiences she published her novel Denier du rêve (1934), revised in 1959. Her knowledge of fascism derived from her acquaintance with Italian life and conversations with Italian intellectuals exiled in Switzerland and southern France. In Italy she witnessed Mussolini's march on Rome. The 1920s were years of continuous travel. So were certain events: a visit to the Villa Adriana was the inspiration for her most famous novel, Mémoires d'Hadrien, which was not completed until 1951. The lucubrations of her youth were seedbeds for her fertile, restless imagination. She composed several hundred pages of manuscript during her early years, threw most of them away, yet preserved fragments that she would turn into complete books 30 or more years later. Equally with the aid of her father she worked out the anagram that became Yourcenar, her pen-name, which became her legal name in 1947. Poems: Le Jardin des Chime‧res (1921) and Les Dieux ne sont pas morts (1922). At this point her formal education ended.īetween the ages of 19 and 23 she began writing and, with a subsidy from her father, published two books of She continued her education with various private tutors and received a Baccalaureate degree in 1919. The remaining years of World War I she passed in Paris with her father, who began her instruction in ancient Greek, or in Provence where her father after suffering serious financial losses, attempted to recover his fortune by gambling at Monte Carlo and elsewhere. Her first trip beyond the continent was to England in 1914 where she spent a year learning English and visiting famous museums and historical sites.
#Memoires d hadrien professional#
She was educated by a professional teacher, but she was in large measure self-educated by visits to museums, the classical theaters, and extensive reading. As a young girl Marguerite lived frequently with an aunt in Belgium and with family friends in northern France until 1912 when she and her father settled in Paris. Her mother, Frenande de Cartier de Marchienne, a Belgian, died ten days after the birth of her daughter of puerperal fever. Her father, Michel de Crayencour, was a native of Lille and a restless traveller, and it was by chance that she was born during her family's brief sojourn in Brussels. Marguerite Yourcenar was born on June 8, 1903, and baptized Marguerite Antoinette Ghislaine.