NORTHEAST HARBOR’S UNION CHURCH WAS full to bursting for Grace Frick’s memorial service. Her brother Gage Frick and his adult daughters, Katharine and Pamela, had traveled to the island for the ceremony. Villagers turned out in force to pay their respects. Deirdre “Dee Dee” Wilson later remembered thinking, “If only Madame would look around this church and see all the people who came out for Grace, she would know how much everyone loved her. But she couldn’t; she was immersed in her own grief.”1 Reverend William Bigelow began the observance by stating that the bereaved had chosen not to have a standard Christian service, although several of the texts were from the Bible. It consisted of the following readings:
Saint Matthew V, The Sermon on the Mount
Saint Paul, I Corinthians XIII
Saint Francis, Canticle of Living Creatures (followed by five minutes of silence)
Chuang-Tzu VII.6
Chuang-Tzu VI.6
The Four Buddhist Vows
A poem by the nineteenth-century Japanese nun Rye-Nen: “Seventy-six years have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of autumn. / I have had time enough to admire the moonlight. Ask me no more: / Only listen to the voice of pine and oak trees, when hardly any wind stirs.”
The statement made by Michel de Crayencour about the death of his wife, Fernande: “We must not complain because this person is not anymore with us; we must rejoice that she has been with us so long.”2
Shortly after Frick’s death, Yourcenar handwrote a note, in English, requesting exactly the same service and burial for herself as was used for her companion. She addressed it jointly to the Somesville funeral directors, Dee Dee Wilson, and Ruth Westphal. No step is left to chance:
In case of my death, I wish to be creamated [sic], and the method of burial to be the same as for Grace Frick:
Take the ashes away from the plastic bag.
Place them in the Indian Basket left for that purpose on the first floor of my house, over the large linen cupboard along the stair railings.
—line the Basket with the two scarves already in it and use one large scarf in my scarf drawer, in my room to wrap all.
—Use the dry flowers in large [sic] with desk over white chest upstairs as done for Grace Frick.
(All my thanks in advance to Didy [sic] and Ruth)
In the left margin, Yourcenar wrote vertically:
Burial hole to be dug some four or five feet north of Grace Frick, that is, at middle or end of plot away from stream.
Dec. 11, 1979, Marguerite Yourcenar3
Before Frick’s funeral had even been held, Yourcenar was designing identical grave markers for Grace and herself, originally foreseen to be in bronze.4 She felt strongly that both plaques “should be undertaken at the same time by the same artist in order not to be disparate.”5 For Frick’s epitaph, Yourcenar chose the phrase “hospes comesque” from the poem with which Memoirs of Hadrian begins and ends.6 In those lines the poet, believed to be Hadrian himself, calls his soul “hospes comesque corporis,” “guest and companion of my body.” He feels affection for that “gentle and drifting” little being full of playfulness, as Clayton Koelb observes, one so intimately bound to the self. Koelb also notes how important the phrase “hospes comesque” was in Yourcenar’s portrait of the emperor: “Early in the Memoirs she has Hadrian invert the figure of the poem by describing his body as ‘my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul.’”7 The inversion is particularly pertinent with regard to Frick and Yourcenar because hospes, like the French hôte, means both “host” and “guest,” implicitly establishing an equivalence in the role each woman played for the other. As Yourcenar once wrote in her personal journal regarding the small offerings she made to the bronze Buddha at the Rockefeller Gardens, “But remember that you yourself are at once the one who offers, and the offering, and the one to whom everything is offered.”8
Grace and Marguerite had carefully designed and landscaped their gravesite together over the years, integrating into it mosses, bunchberry, ferns, and other native plantings. It was important to Yourcenar that the site be maintained according to her wishes. On the day after Christmas that year, she sent a check for ten thousand dollars to the Brookside Cemetery Society, “as a memorial for my friend Grace Frick,” requesting specifically that the two linden trees near the stream be replaced in the spring. Yourcenar had already arranged to plant two trees on their lot, “either cedar, yew, ginkgo, or white pine, on each side of the rock already in place.”9 By the time I knew Mme Yourcenar in the 1980s, the two trees on the site were birches with twin trunks, and they needed replacing. In discussing them with the gardener one day, the author repeatedly emphasized that the new trees must be just like the old ones. No doubt to signify, as I wrote in my journal at the time, the two women “growing together.”10
Perhaps the most poignant expression of condolence that Yourcenar received regarding Frick’s death came from the man with whom she had been conversing at the Hôtel Wagram on that February day in 1937 when she and Frick met, Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte. Composed on stationery from Capri’s Minerva Hotel, the letter is dated October 4, 1980, suggesting that it took some time for Nel to find the courage to write. “I did not dare speak to you of Grace,” he said,
but thought about it all the more. My sister met the challenge, quite naturally. You responded in kind. Do know at least that when you would like to speak of her, I will always lend you an attentive ear, and more. I had associated her with Céler, the faithful friend all the way to Baies, and yet, you were Céler, too. When I see you, I will see her again.
I wait for you with my old admiration and my deepened affection.
NEL11
Yourcenar, who had learned to ride a horse because it meant so much to Frick, saved this letter comparing both her and Grace to Hadrian’s faithful steed. At the top of it she wrote, “To Keep / Grace Frick.” Obviously, Nel had struck a chord.
On March 6, 1980, Mme Yourcenar was finally elected to the Académie française. Congratulatory messages came pouring in. One was from Katherine Gatch, Frick and Yourcenar’s Woodbridge, Connecticut, friend whose companion by then had also lost her life to breast cancer. “You will know,” said Gatch, “that I also thought about Grace and of the unbearable irony that she was cheated by so short a time of the final triumph of accompanying you to Paris. Not the least of your achievements is what you did for her life.”12 The unbearable irony, of course, had to do with what Frick had done for Yourcenar’s.