In an entry in the composition ‘reflections’ that begins ‘Experiments with time’, Yourcenar continues to evoke her methods for crossing the 18 centuries between Hadrian and herself: ‘Eighteen days, eighteen months, eighteen years or eighteen centuries. The motionless survival of statues which, like the head of the Mondragone Antinous in the Louvre, are still living in a past time, a time that has died.’ (RC, 321) Statues could nonetheless help Yourcenar overcome time, as Rémy Poignault has argued, since she aimed to ‘redo from within what the archaeologists of the 19th C. had done from without’ (CN, 327). The historical novel for her should be ‘a plunge into time recaptured, taking possession of an inner world’ (CN, 331). Hence she adds: ‘Time has nothing to do with it. My contemporaries, who consider that they have mastered and transformed space, always surprise me by not realising that one can contract the distance between centuries at will’ (CN 331). Yourcenar felt connected to Hadrian when she was invited to handle the Marlborough Gem by its owner Sangiorgi in 1952; in her view it is the one object which we can be sure Hadrian himself handled. She also writes in the ‘reflections’: ‘Every being who has gone through the adventure of living is myself’ (RC 342). History for Yourcenar is man’s condition illustrated, largely from the perspective of a single individual. At the same time and as a logical extension of her desire to mobilise the past, the resulting text was not fixed: Yourcenar made corrections in subsequent editions, added to the composition notes and revised her lengthy bibliographical notice, taking into account suggestions and criticisms.
Yourcenar recorded early in those composition notes the significance for her of the following passage from Flaubert’s correspondence: ‘The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ was infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions – nothing but the fixity of a pensive gaze. With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.’ Yourcenar’s Hadrian has both the melancholic outlook and ‘the fixity of a pensive gaze’. In her notes Yourcenar glosses Flaubert’s sentence by stating that she would spend a large part of her life trying to define and then depict this man on his own, who was also, as she adds, ‘connected to everything’. Thus the idea of the gods having completely departed is not born out by Memoirs of Hadrian: being connected to everything, ‘relié à tout’, involves religion, of which Hadrian and Yourcenar herself have many. This aspect of the 2nd Century was emphasised as well during the Antinous study afternoon at the Henry Moore Institute in July 2006.