Preface
1. Yourcenar, Le Tour de la prison.
2. Paul Minear to the author, December 22, 1993. At the top of this three-page, single-spaced typewritten letter, Minear indicated that the document was “not for publication.” I obtained permission to quote from it only what I’ve quoted herein when I interviewed Paul and Gladys Minear, April 5–6, 2004.
3. Jean Hazelton, interview with the author, August 8, 2006. See also GFAB, November 22, 1951.
4. Ibid., Hazelton links the comments quoted here to pages 198, 206, 207, and 318 of Savigneau’s Inventing a Life.
5. Jean Hazelton to Gladys Minear, November 26, 1993, Hazelton family archives.
6. Stephen Goode, review of Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, by Josyane Savigneau, Washington Times, October 31, 1993.
7. Review of Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, by Josyane Savigneau, Publishers Weekly 240, no. 36 (1993): n.p.
8. L. Peat O’Neil, “Invent Your Life—Lest Someone Beat You to It,” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 9, no. 3 (1993–94): 22.
9. See, e.g., Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 50–60.
10. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 121.
11. Savigneau, L’Invention d’une vie.
12. Michèle Goslar, quoted in Elisabeth Mertens, “L’Esprit et la chair,” Le Vif/L’Express, June 6–12, 2003, 75. See also Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade.”
13. Rousseau, Yourcenar, 10, 14.
14. Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 247, 274. Sarde’s book, written entirely in the formal second-person plural as if addressed directly to Yourcenar, is not technically a biography. The text is one side of an “imaginary dialogue” containing novelistic elements. It has a biography’s heft, however, along with a traditional scholarly apparatus based on published and unpublished sources.
15. Malcolm, Two Lives, 205, 206.
16. Joan Acocella, “Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar Reinvented the Past,” New Yorker, February 14 and 21, 2005, 246.
17. The Guppy interview is preserved at the Houghton Library, MYC (856). There were so many changes to the original transcript that Yourcenar recopied by hand most of the amended text before returning it—slowly—to Guppy. She was not happy with this interview from the beginning, and she eventually wrote to Guppy that she had to “forbid completely the text of this interview, in any form, and, as usual, send a copy of it to my lawyer.” Yourcenar’s subsequent death may have been the only reason that the interview made it to print.
18. Guppy interview. “The usual story”? I suspect that many would not consider this arrangement “usual” at all. As for being “of a certain age,” Marguerite was thirty-three, and Grace had just turned thirty-four. They were hardly fossilized.
19. P. N. Furbank, “The Time of Her Life,” New York Review of Books, October 19, 1995, 53.
20. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 18, 1956, MYC (1032). There is some question about whether this letter was ever mailed to Barney, but the sentiment remains the same either way.
21. Marguerite Yourcenar, interview by Jacques Chancel, Radioscopie, France Inter, Wednesday, June 13, 1979. Over the course of two days, Chancel taped ten hours of conversation with Yourcenar, only five of which were put on air. At least some of the material that was not broadcast has been provided in Chancel’s Marguerite Yourcenar: Radioscopie.
22. Yourcenar, Quoi? L’Éternité, 278.
Prologue
1. I contacted Harris at Ohio State University in 2009, hoping that he would have a copy of Frick’s original translation of that play. He did not, but he had something much more precious: a forty-five-minute tape recording of Frick made on November 27, 1977, now in the HFA.
2. Frick recording, November 1977; Grace Frick, handwritten note from 1934, PPA.
3. February 1937 register of the Port of Cherbourg, Cherbourg Communication Service.
4. McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, 53.
5. Frick recording, November 1977. I have omitted uh’s and um’s and made a few other minor changes to the transcript of Grace’s oral account for the sake of readability and clarity. Ellipses points (. . .) mark pauses in Grace’s remarks, while bracketed ellipsis points ([. . .]) indicate my own omissions. Because this recording was made during a car ride around Mount Desert Island, ellipsis points often mark locations in the spoken text where Grace was giving directions or commenting on points of historical interest.
6. Grace first visited her cousin Nancy (aka Sister Marie Yann) on February 5, 1937. Sister Yann died two days later. Archives of Notre Dame de Sion.
7. Frick recording, November 1977.
8. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 115.
9. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 115, 116, 117. Savigneau describes Codman, now deceased, as “an editor, an intellectual, and a Francophile, who was Jane Bowles’s friend” (115).
10. Frick recording, November 1977.
11. I assumed at the time, though I can’t be certain, that Mme Yourcenar was talking about a lesbian nightclub. Josyane Savigneau, in Inventing a Life, 91, speaks of Yourcenar’s “dissipation” at this time in her life, “meaning alcohol (a little), men (no doubt a few), and women (a lot, beyond a doubt).” Florence Tamagne similarly notes in The History of Homosexuality in Europe, 186–87, that Yourcenar “led a dissipated life including many love affairs until she met the American academic Grace Frick, in 1937, with whom she shared the rest of her life. She was a regular on the Paris lesbian scene, at the Thé Colombin, rue du Mont-Thabor, and Wagram, 208 rue de Rivoli, and she was a mainstay of the local night life.” Thé Colombin was right around the corner from the Hôtel Wagram, and it possessed the signal distinction of having been mentioned several times in Marcel Proust’s monumental In Search of Lost Time.
12. Frick recording, November 1977.
Chapter 1
1. Alice May Self was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on January 1, 1872. John Henry Frick was born in Bloomington, Illinois, in October 1871. His last name was originally spelled Fricke. John Henry apparently dropped the e, a change that was made legal by his children. His younger sister Carrie, by contrast, kept it.
2. “Samuel M. Jones,” Ohio History Central, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Samuel_M._Jones.
3. Information about John Henry’s employment obtained from U.S. Census Bureau, 1900 U.S. Census of Toledo; Toledo City Directories of 1898–1903; and FFA.
4. Grace Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942, WCA. Alice May Self received teacher training at either Warsaw or Fort Wayne, Indiana, probably attending an ad hoc institute. The training itself was apparently quite rudimentary, and the examinations were extremely tough. Failure rates sometimes topped 50 percent.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, April 20, 1976, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 501. Yourcenar’s letter also noted that there was no relation between Grace’s family and that of the wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist.
6. “Horrible Accident,” Fort Wayne Daily Gazette, July 9, 1885.
7. This description of George A. LaRue is based on his obituary in the Kansas City Star, April 21, 1943.
8. “Kansas City,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Kansas-City-Missouri; and “Paris of the Plains: The Jazz Age in Kansas City, 1920–1940,” University of Missouri–Kansas City, http://library.umkc.edu/spec-col/parisoftheplains/webexhibit/page2.htm.
9. Charles O. LaRue had established his printing business in 1896; Stevens, Centennial History of Missouri, 4:977–78.
10. U.S. Census Bureau, 1900 U.S. Census of Toledo. Katharine and Anna’s parents emigrated from Ireland.
11. Obituary of Marion C. Self, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, February 22, 1916, 13.
12. Information about the LaRue family residences, the Frick-Bacon marriage, and George W. Bacon comes primarily from public records, annual directories of Kansas City, 1908–19, and U.S. censuses.
13. Mme Yourcenar later said that Frick loved her uncle “passionately.” Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 13, 1983.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar, in Pierre Desfons, dir., Saturday Blues, a 1984 documentary made for broadcast on the French television station TF1.
15. Seymour, ed., History of the American Field Service, appendix G, “Roster of Volunteers of the American Field Service in France, 1915–16–17,” http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/AFShist/AFS3l3.htm.
16. “Frederick C. Frick Wins the French War Cross for His Bravery,” Westport Crier, December 19, 1917.
17. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 31.
18. “Indiana, Marriage Index, 1800–1941,” Ancestry, https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=5059.
19. Bowery Street has since become Fleming Avenue.
20. U.S. Census Bureau, 1900 U.S. Census of Newark, New Jersey.
21. U.S. Census Bureau, 1910 U.S. Census of Newark, New Jersey.
22. Fort Wayne Gazette, April 4, 1886, 8.
23. U.S. Census Bureau, 1920 U.S. Census of West Paterson, New Jersey. “John J.” is the name given for Cora’s husband in all the censuses. The age and ancestral birthplaces given in 1920 also match up with previous records.
24. U.S. Census Bureau, 1930 U.S. Census of Kansas City, Missouri, identifies the LaRues’ youngest charge as Nancy G. Gallagher, with the “G.” presumably standing for Grace.
25. National Register of Historic Places, nomination form for Mineral Hall, http://www.dnr.mo.gov/shpo/nps-nr/76001112.pdf.
26. Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942.
27. Designed by the prominent architect Frederick C. Gunn, the building is included in a walking tour of Kansas City’s Library District; see Kansas City Public Library, “Library District Walking Tour,” http://www.kclibrary.org/district-tour.
28. Anonymous typewritten document, FFA.
29. “Now Take a Man of His Type,” n.d., FFA.
30. See, e.g., the website of the Westport Historical Society, http://westporthistorical.com; and “A Brief History of Westport,” http://www.westportkc.com/history.php.
31. “Battle of Westport,” http://www.battleofwestport.org; “Missouri Civil War,” http://www.missouricivilwar.net; and American Battlefield Protection Program, “CWSAC Battle Summaries: Westport,” http://www.nps.gov/hps/abpp/battles/mo027.htm.
32. Juana Summers, “Westport High School Alumni Look Back on Decades of History,” Kansas City Free Press, June 2, 2010. The school closed its doors forever in 2010.
33. Daniel Smith (Kansas City historian), e-mail to the author, August 15, 2010.
34. “Club Notes,” Westport Crier, January 5, 1921.
35. Quotations are from the 1921 Westport High School Herald.
36. “Conference of High School Journalists at Lawrence,” Westport Crier, December 1, 1920.
37. Westport Crier, February 2, 1921.
38. Westport Crier, January 5, 1921.
39. See the 1921 Westport High School Herald, 89–91. Highest distinction was accorded those with a minimum of thirty academic E’s. Four of the 167 female students achieved that status in 1921, as did one of the 114 male students, all of whose names preceded those of the school’s female students in the Herald’s class roster.
40. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 4, 1983. Cushman McGiffert, retired president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and his wife came for tea on the lawn at Petite Plaisance on June 30, 1983. While Mme Yourcenar was inside the house answering a telephone call, Dr. McGiffert ventured to tell me that Miss Frick was “a contemporary woman” who got involved in all sorts of causes and local controversies, whereas Mme Yourcenar was more oriented toward the past. When I mentioned the comment to Mme Yourcenar a while later, she called the observation “absurd,” adding that both she and Grace Frick were engaged in causes such as conservation, civil rights, protesting the Vietnam War, and so on, and that Grace’s favorite literature was Elizabethan poetry.
41. The wealthy and fabled American dressmaker Nelly Don lived across the street from the new LaRue residence, but her fashion sense probably didn’t rub off on Grace. Judging from the comments made by friends and acquaintances, neither Grace nor Marguerite paid a great deal of attention to her attire. As Dee Dee Wilson once remarked, Mme Yourcenar was convinced that anything a Frenchwoman wore was automatically stylish.
Chapter 2
1. Shirley McGarr (longtime friend of Frick and Yourcenar), interview with the author, September 4, 2005.
2. Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 135.
3. Frick’s most extensive chronology of her life dates back only to 1925, the year she graduated from college. See GFC.
4. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 102–3.
5. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Wellesley has remained the highest ranked of the now Five Sisters according to the yearly analysis of American liberal arts colleges compiled by U.S. News and World Report. See the rankings for 2018 at https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges.
6. Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart, 30.
7. Michelle Gibson and Deborah T. Meem, “Introduction,” in Gibson and Meem, eds., Lesbian Academic Couples, 4.
8. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 137–39.
9. Grace E. Hawk, “A Motto in Transit,” in Glasscock, ed., Wellesley College, 1875–1975, 212.
10. Ibid., 212–13.
11. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 246, 148.
12. “Westporter Tells of Student Life at Wellesley,” Westport Crier, January 5, 1921.
13. Eleanor Wallace Allen, “Greetings from Twenty-Fifth Reunion Class,” 1, WCA.
14. Wellesley College Bulletin, 1921–22, WCA.
15. Grace Frick, official academic transcript, obtained from the Office of the Registrar, Wellesley College, in February 2011.
16. Ibid.
17. David M. Hays, e-mail to the author, January 26, 2011.
18. WCCC, 1950, 28, WCA.
19. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 203, 183, 185.
20. Lucy Dow Cushing, handwritten history of Alpha Kappa Chi, WCA.
21. Wellesley College News, various dates, 1923–25.
22. Thrale, Thraliana.
23. Balderston died in 1979 at the age of eighty-four; see “Katharine C. Balderston, 84, Dies; Professor Emeritus at Wellesley,” New York Times, November 23, 1979. Shackford herself died four years later, leaving a fifty-thousand-dollar bequest to Wellesley College; Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 108.
24. GFAB, 1969 and 1970.
25. Wellesley College Bulletin, 1923–24, 111, WCA.
26. Grace Frick, student information card, obtained from the Office of the Registrar, Wellesley College, in February 2011.
27. Grace Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942, WCA.
28. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 17, 1983.
29. See, e.g., Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 169.
30. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 80, 165.
31. In 1977 Grace discussed Milton’s work with Donald Harris and Nadine Bicher as if she had read it the day before. Grace Frick, audio recording by Donald Harris, November 27, 1977, HFA.
32. Wellesley College Bulletin, 1924–25, 64, WCA.
33. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 165.
34. Fergusson, O’Gorman, and Rhodes, The Landscape and Architecture of Wellesley College, 84.
35. “Simplicity Keynote of Tree Day Program,” Wellesley College News, May 28, 1925, 1.
36. Wellesley College News, April 16, 1925, quoted in Glasscock, Wellesley College, 353.
37. “Supreme Beauty Is Message of Pageant,” Wellesley College News, May 28, 1925, 1.
38. “Academic March to Start Celebration,” Wellesley College News, May 28, 1925, 1.
39. “Celebration Marks Fiftieth Anniversary of the College,” Wellesley College News, June 4, 1925, 1.
40. Ibid., 1–2; “Anniversary Services for Delegates to Be in Chapel,” Wellesley College News, May 28, 1925, 1.
41. Barbara P. McCarthy, “Anniversary Celebrations,” in Glasscock, ed., Wellesley College, 352.
42. “Celebration Marks Fiftieth,” Wellesley College News, June 4, 1925, 2.
43. Ibid., 3.
44. McCarthy, “Anniversary Celebrations,” 357.
45. “New Point of View Given by Dr. Black,” Wellesley College News, June 25, 1925, 1.
46. Allen, “Greetings,” 3.
47. Ibid.
Chapter 3
1. Grace Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942, WCA.
2. WCCC, 1929, 17, WCA; Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942.
3. WCCC, 1927, 19, WCA. Horton House was and still is a large brick building at 666 Washington Street, providing rental housing for Wellesley faculty. Grace rented a small apartment there in 1926–27.
4. Pauline Adams (retired librarian and archivist of Somerville College, Oxford University), e-mails to the author, February 11 and March 7, 2011.
5. GFC.
6. Missouri Digital Heritage Collections, Stephensophia Collection, http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/mdh_splash/default.asp?coll=stephens.
7. “History of Stephens,” http://www.eastchance.com/uni.asp?id=2203; Stephens College, “Timeline,” https://www.stephens.edu/about-stephens/timeline.
8. Stephensophia, 1928, 17, 19, 23.
9. “War and Reconciliation: Mid-Missouri Civil War Project,” University of Missouri–Columbia School of Law, http://law.missouri.edu/bowman/index.html.
10. Sources include Alan Scher Zagier, “Mo. Corrects Record on 1923 College-Town Lynching,” November 8, 2010, NBC News, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/40077595/ns/us_news-life; Alan Havig to the author, February 23, 2011; Katy Bergen, “Columbia Man Works to Change Death Certificate of Lynching Victim,” Missourian, September 12, 2010, https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/columbia-man-works-to-change-death-certificate-of-lynching-victim/article_0869f547-7892-5ceb-8ecb-43c14794ef8d.html; Katy Bergen, “Benefit Raises Money for James T. Scott Headstone,” Missourian, November 8, 2010, https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/benefit-raises-money-for-james-t-scott-headstone/article_082899d9-b4ea-535a-948a-bec9c18a38d2.html; and “Old Stewart Road Bridge, Site of James T. Scott Lynching,” http://www.columbiamissourian.com/multimedia/photo/2010/09/12/old-stewart-road-bridge-site-james-t-scott-lynching.
11. Alan Havig to the author, February 23, 2011.
12. Dudley also headed the English department in 1913–14. Bryn Mawr College Calendar, 1916, vol. 9, part 2, 36.
13. Stephensophia, 1932, 22, and 1935, 34.
14. Stephensophia, 1935, 14.
15. Stephens College, “A Tradition of Innovation,” Ideal Connection, fall 2010, http://www.stephens.edu/alumnae/magazine/wp/?p=945.
16. Dudley and Faricy, The Humanities, signed copy in the PPA.
17. Dudley and Faricy, The Humanities, 4th ed., signed copy in the PPA.
18. Stephensophia, 1929, 64.
19. Stephensophia, 1930, 200.
20. See the letters of Louise Dudley to Grace Frick, MYC (2456). Dudley died in 1975 at the age of ninety-one.
21. Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography of Cellini, trans. Thomas Roscoe (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Kent, n.d.).
22. See “Benvenuto Cellini,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benvenuto-Cellini-Italian-artist; and Dino S. Cervigni, “Cellini’s Vita, or the Unfinished Story of a Disillusioned Hero,” Modern Language Quarterly 39 (1978): 15–26.
23. Grace Frick to Gladys and Paul Minear, August 7, 1949, MFA.
24. The bookcase next to Grace’s bed at Petite Plaisance still holds an inscribed copy of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, which Helen Darbishire edited. It is liberally annotated by Grace, suggesting that she used it in her teaching.
25. Pauline Adams, e-mail to the author, February 11, 2011.
26. Ann Birstein, telephone interview with the author, April 3, 2011.
27. Chapman, Oxford Playhouse, 68; Jane Hornsby (of the Oxford Playhouse), e-mail to the author, February 15, 2011.
28. WCCC, 1929, 6, WCA.
29. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Grace Frick’s annotated copy, PPA.
30. Ibid., 317.
31. Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes, 5th ed., Grace Frick’s annotated copy, PPA.
32. GFC.
33. WCCC, 1929, 11, WCA.
34. Information about Grace’s ocean crossings obtained from ship’s manifests, “All Immigration and Travel results for Grace M Frick,” Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com/search/categories/40/?name=Grace+M._Frick&birth=1903_Toledo-Ohio&gender=f&location=2&name_x=_1&priority=usa.
35. Grace Frick to Paul and Gladys Minear, November 15, 1949, MFA.
36. Alan Havig to the author, February 23, 2011.
37. Grace Frick, “A Survey Unit for the Study of English Literature” (manuscript), 1930, Stephens College Archives, 3.
38. Dudley, The Study of Literature, v.
39. Frick, “Survey Unit,” 1.
40. Ibid., 4–5.
41. Ibid., 8.
42. For Frick’s cross-burning experience, see Yourcenar, Blues et gospels, 10.
43. Frick, “Survey Unit,” 6–10.
44. Ibid., 18–19.
45. Ibid., 19.
46. See, e.g., Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 117.
47. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 116. Codman’s friend, at least in the 1940s, was Margot Hill; GFAB, 1945.
48. Marianne Zerner, postcard to Grace Frick, May 12, 1933, Northeast Harbor Public Library Archives. A 1939 Yale PhD, the Vienna-born Zerner taught German at Queens College of the City University of New York. She never married.
49. Mme Yourcenar, for her part, had this to say about The Well late in life: “The Well of Loneliness garnered interest owing to its scandalous aspects (for the time), which is not negligible, but it is very bad literature.” Marguerite Yourcenar to the author, July 7, 1986.
50. The two women intersected at Stephens in 1929–30 and, according to Rummell’s aunt, Jo Markwyn, possibly also the previous year. Jo Markwyn, e-mail to the author, February 18, 2011.
51. Frederics, Diana, a Strange Autobiography, 139–40.
52. U.S. Census Bureau, 1930 U.S. Census of Kansas City, ward 4; Stephanie Schmidts (former principal of Notre Dame de Sion in Kansas City), e-mail to the author, April 10, 2010.
53. Frick spoke of Nancy’s scholastic difficulties with Donald Harris. Grace Frick, audio recording by Donald Harris, November 27, 1977, HFA.
54. Grace Frick, graduate transcript, University of Kansas Archives.
55. Gladys Minear to the author, November 5, 2007. Both porch and lawn disappeared in 2007.
56. Gladys Minear to the author, February 19, 2007.
57. Frick recording, November 1977.
58. WCCC, 1932, 20, WCA.
59. Grace Frick, official transcript, obtained from the Yale University Registrar’s Office; GFC.
60. Judith Ann Schiff (chief research archivist, YMA), e-mail to the author, July 12, 2006.
61. Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare, copy in the PPA.
62. Diane E. Kaplan (head of research services, YMA), e-mail to the author, December 10, 2010.
63. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 13, 1983.
Chapter 4
1. Scott O’Kelley, “Boss Tom,” University of Missouri–Kansas City, https://web.archive.org/web/20160322191657/http://library.umkc.edu/spec-col/parisoftheplains/webexhibit/political/pol-01.htm.
2. Arthur Holst, “The Politician and Political Machines,” in Sisson, Zacher, and Cayton, eds., The American Midwest, 1702.
3. Grace Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942, WCA; Lawrence H. Larsen, “Gage, John Bailey, 1887–1970,” in Lawrence O. Christensen et al., eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography, 327.
4. Frick, biographical questionnaire, 1942.
5. “Missouri: Vote of Confidence,” Time, April 11, 1938, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759419,00.html.
6. Scott Bekker, “Pendergast’s Ghost: Fifteen Indicted in Two Years in Missouri,” Austin American Statesman, November 29, 1996; John E. Hansan, “The Pendergast Machine of Kansas City, Missouri (1900–1939),” Social Welfare History Project, February 28, 2011, http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/eras/pendergast-machine; “Tom Pendergast: Boss of Kansas City Ages, and Turn of Fortune Changes,” Newsweek, March 21, 1938, 10–11.
7. Frick family documents, FFA.
8. Brian Burnes, “Women Defeated Kansas City Machine Rule,” Kansas City Star, March 30, 1996.
9. Bekker, “Pendergast’s Ghost”; Hansan, “The Pendergast Machine.”
10. Celia Fritz-Watson (director of alumnae[i] affairs), Notre Dame de Sion High School, Kansas City), e-mail to the author, April 13, 2010.
11. Notre Dame de Sion, “Jerusalem—150 Year [sic] of Presence,” http://www.notredamedesion.org/en/news.php?caso=view&id=7.
12. “Kansas City’s Historic Hyde Park,” https://web.archive.org/web/20101214083318/http://hydeparkkansascity.retrosites.com.
13. “George LaRue Dies,” Kansas City Star, April 21, 1943.
14. Grace Frick, audio recording by Donald Harris, November 27, 1977, HFA.
15. Patricia Cusick (London archives of the Sisters of Sion), e-mail to the author, May 28, 2010.
16. Information on Sister Marie Yann from the Archives of the USA/Canada Province of Notre Dame de Sion, received from Catherine Seemann (archivist for Notre Dame de Sion’s Canada/USA Province) and Stephanie Schmidts via e-mail, April 9, 2010.
17. Céline Hirsch (lay archivist for the European Province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion in Paris), e-mail to the author, May 5, 2010. Hirsch explained the likely provenance of Nancy’s religious name.
18. The other three hotels were the Continental, the Grand, and the Ritz. Nancy’s address, that of Sion’s mother house in Paris, and “Grandbourg (country place)” constituted the remainder of Grace’s notes.
19. GFC.
20. Yourcenar biographies have located this convent in Fontainebleau, as Frick did in her chronology, calling it a country house or château. Notre Dame de Sion has never owned a property in Fontainebleau, and archival records of the Sion Sisters preserved in Paris clearly indicate that both the novices and the postulants went on retreat at Grandbourg in August 1934. Céline Hirsch, e-mail to the author, April 30, 2010; Catherine Seemann, e-mail to the author, March 17, 2011. Information about the family’s comings and goings here and in subsequent paragraphs come from GFC; and ships’ manifests, “Passenger lists,” Ancestry, https://search.ancestry.com/search/category.aspx?cat=112.
21. WCCC, 1935, 18, WCA. The Piccadilly Theatre copy of the Sangster play resides on the bookshelf next to Grace Frick’s bed at Petite Plaisance, along with many other volumes related to the Brontës.
22. GFC.
23. Grace Frick, alumni information sheet, May 13, 1935, YMA.
24. Margaret Bottral to Grace Frick, December 21, 1934, MYP (1185).
25. Patricia Cusick, e-mail to the author, May 28, 2010. Issy became a retirement home for Sion Sisters in the 1960s, closing its doors for good in 1997; Céline Hirsch, e-mail to the author, April 26, 2010.
26. Frick recording, November 1977.
27. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 35.
28. Sionian letter from the mother house, January–March 1937, received via e-mail from Catherine Seemann, March 3, 2011.
29. House journal, Issy-les-Moulineaux, February 7, 1937.
30. Sionian Letter from the mother house, January–March 1937.
31. House journal, Issy-les-Moulineaux, February 9, 1937.
32. Céline Hirsch, e-mail to the author, April 20, 2010.
33. Independent: Kansas City’s Journal of Society, March 6, 1937, 4.
34. Celia Fritz-Watson, e-mail to the author, April 16, 2011.
35. Emily Sophian to Grace Frick, [second half of] February 1937, MYP (1230).
36. Ibid.
37. Hirsch e-mail, April 20, 2010.
Chapter 5
Epigraph: According to the 1922 Wellesley Legenda, 185, WCA, “Incipit Vita Nova” [The new life begins], by a Wellesley College freshman, appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly (date not given in the Legenda). Here is the whole poem:
Chained by enchantment to the spot.
My being throbs with palpitating joys;
Yet I am stilled.
A thousand lovely fancies
Play upon my mind,
A thousand lovely words
Spring to my lips;
Yet I am dumb.
I stand spellbound,
Chained by enchantment to the spot.
I have just seen
My Village Senior.
1. Yourcenar, Feux, 9–10, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 104.
2. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Notre-Dame-des-Hirondelles,” Revue hebdomadaire, January 2, 1937, 40–49; Marguerite Yourcenar, “Mozart à Salzbourg,” Revue bleue no. 3 (1937): 88–89.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Le Lait de la mort,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, March 20, 1937, 1–2.
4. Woolf, Les Vagues. Coincidentally, Woolf appeared on the cover of Time magazine on April 12, 1937; the article calls The Waves her masterpiece.
5. See, e.g., Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 98; and Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 175.
6. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 12, 1984. What I wrote in my journal on July 13, 1984, was actually the following: “M.Y. was living with the man of the seven-year relationship at the hotel when she met G.F.” We had been discussing the beginnings of her relationship with Grace.
I realize that readers are likely to see André Fraigneau in Mme Yourcenar’s description of a difficult man, and I cannot dismiss that possibility outright. But Fraigneau himself has made clear that he never reciprocated Yourcenar’s passion for him. Certainly he would not have been “living,” or even staying temporarily, at the Hôtel Wagram with Yourcenar in early 1937. Indeed, the 1936 work Feux leaves one with little doubt that whatever level of intimacy there may ever have been between Yourcenar and Fraigneau was a thing of the past.
In contrast to Fraigneau, Yourcenar did acknowledge, throughout her life, having had a relationship with Embiricos. As a Greek national, Embiricos may also have had reason to frequent the Hôtel Wagram. Though Fraigneau was both a writer and an editor, Embiricos was also a writer—the very one, in fact, who was by Yourcenar’s side day and night when she was working on Feux and Nouvelles orientales. In March 1935, shortly before he took Yourcenar cruising on the Black Sea, Embiricos had published a volume of surrealist prose poems, similar in form if not in content to the texts of Fires, entitled Blast Furnace. Knowing how the group of literary friends with whom Yourcenar associated during the 1930s often discussed their works in progress with—and drew inspiration from—one another, one would be hard pressed not to see at least a superficial connection between Yourcenar’s “fires” and Embiricos’s “furnace.” Yourcenar was hardly a surrealist, but Feux was the closest she ever came to being one.
Biographers have been reluctant to say whether Yourcenar’s relationship with Embiricos, whom she always called a “friend,” included sexual intimacy. The information that is available to us now about the Greek writer and psychoanalyst strongly suggests that he would not have spent three months sailing virtually alone with her if it had not. Yourcenar, for her part, was then and would remain throughout her life, as she preferred to say, “sensually adventurous.”
Finally, a document composed by Yourcenar not long before her death lends further credence to the hypothesis that Embiricos was “the man of the seven-year relationship.” It is the small, red, hardcover book in which Yourcenar jotted down the provenance of objects at Petite Plaisance that she had acquired over the course of her life. Speaking of the modern print that hangs over her bed, she wrote (in the telegraphic style she used for this volume), “A charming drawing in itself, but trivialized by too many reproductions, by a contemporary Chinese painter whose name escapes me. Represents a horse, outlined in black on a white background. (In my mind the legendary horse that flies into the sky every 1,000 years.) Gift of André Embiricos who had just bought it in a boutique on the quays during our last meeting in Paris (1937).” PPA, emphasis added.
7. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 7, 1983.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 12, 1984.
9. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 114–15.
10. First published in July 1937 in Nouvelles littéraires, “Une Visite à Virginia Woolf” was later incorporated into “Une Femme étincelante et timide,” ADAM International Review 364–66 (1972): 16–17, and reprinted in En pèlerin, 107–20, and Essais et mémoires, 490–98.
11. Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 136.
12. Documentation accompanying the Image Works photographs supplies the date of February 5, 1937.
13. Fernande, born on February 23, 1872, and Grace’s Aunt Dolly, born on February 24, 1873, almost shared a birthday.
14. Alberto Manguel would later translate that story, “Our-Lady-of-the-Swallows,” and others into English in Oriental Tales.
15. Jerry Wilson, personal journal, February 28, 1980, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 115.
16. Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 226–27.
17. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 13, 1983.
18. Fraigneau, speaking in 1989 and quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 102.
19. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5:60–61. Edmond Jaloux, the French critic who had saluted a major new talent when Alexis came out in 1929, was an admirer of Woolf. He may have been the one to suggest that Yourcenar translate The Waves. The Margeries were a family of diplomats well known in both Paris and London.
20. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Une Visite à Virginia Woolf,” later incorporated into “Une Femme étincelante et timide,” and reprinted in En pèlerin, 116 (first published in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 114).
21. WCCC, 1937, WCA.
22. GFC; GFAB, 1966. See also WCCC, June 1937, 19, WCA.
23. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 118.
24. Charlotte Musson to Marguerite Yourcenar, December 22, [1970s?,] MYP (755).
25. Deirdre Wilson, telephone conversation with the author, January 21, 2010.
26. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 14, 1983.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar, immigration papers, MYC (569).
28. Grace Frick to Paul and Gladys Minear, November 13, 1949, MFA.
29. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Karagheuz et le théâtre d’ombres en Grèce,” 1938, in En pèlerin, 17.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Marionnettes de Sicile,” in En pèlerin, 36, 37, 39.
31. The Elymi were identified by the Greek historian Thucydides as being a people of Trojan origin.
32. See, e.g., “Segesta,” Trapani Sicilia, http://www.trapani-sicilia.it/english/segesta.htm.
33. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 262.
34. Historical information about sites in Sicily comes from “Segesta,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Segesta; and “Taormina,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Taormina. Information on places visited by Frick and Yourcenar comes from GFC; and GFAB, 1966.
35. Yourcenar speaks of “Hitler ranting in Naples (I hear him to this day) flanked by two rows of eagles in simulated stone” in How Many Years, 129. “D’après Greco” was one of three short stories published together in 1934 in La Mort conduit l’attelage. It later became Anna, soror . . .
36. Grace Frick, postcard to Ruth Hall, July 19, 1937, PPA.
37. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 262.
38. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Objets à Northeast Harbor” (manuscript), PPA.
39. Yourcenar, “Karagheuz,” 20.
40. Caïmi, Karaghiozi, inscribed copy in Frick’s bedroom, Petite Plaisance.
41. According to the passenger list for that New York–bound crossing, Yourcenar boarded the Conte di Savoia with Frick and then returned to shore before the ship set sail. Curiously, Yourcenar is identified as “M,” married, on that ship’s manifest. Five weeks later, when she traveled from Le Havre to New York, she is classified as “S,” single; but on the passenger list from October 1939, when Yourcenar sailed from Bordeaux to New York, one finds a “D,” for divorced, next to her name! Intriguingly, Yourcenar told Bernice Pierce, her and Frick’s housekeeper for many years on Mount Desert Island, that she had once been married; Bernice Pierce, interview with the author, June 20, 2010.
Regarding her marital status, Yourcenar also made an ambiguous comment to attorney Ruth Hall in the early 1950s on a questionnaire related to the disposition of her papers in the event of her death. To the question “Have you ever been married?” she responded, “No. The Mme. generally used is the French usage for women writing, etc [sic]; like the Miss for the married actresses in England. Also of a long, but not legal, attachment, now nroken [sic] for many years.” Financial Papers, Will of Marguerite Yourcenar, 1943–1953, MYC (562). If Yourcenar’s explanation had ended after “attachment,” it would be unequivocally general; the “now [b]roken for many years” seems to particularize it, however. There is reason to wonder whether she means to refer to the “seven-year relationship” in which she once spoke of having been involved during the 1930s.
42. Sandomenico, Il “viaggio di nozze” di Marguerite Yourcenar.
43. Between 1934 and 1944, the national symbol for Italian gold and silver was the fasces, a bundle of rods with a protruding ax blade that, among its other historical uses, was the emblem of Mussolini’s Fascist party. The symbol for Arezzo, one of four main centers for Italian gold jewelry, is AR. The symbol for Uno a Erre in that city is 1. Both symbols, along with the fasces, are present on the inside of Grace and Marguerite’s rings.
44. Sue Lonoff de Cuevas discusses the provenance of this bookplate in her perceptive study Croquis et griffonnis, 52–53.
45. Alesch, The Other/Reader, 148, notes that hands are “closely associated with life, and even with the soul” in Yourcenar’s oeuvre.
Chapter 6
Epigraph: This stanza of the poem “Human Life” is highlighted in Grace Frick’s copy of Matthew Arnold’s Poems, 174, PPA.
1. Cecil Miller, quoted by his son John Miller, e-mail to the author, June 13, 2012. Regarding Frick’s 1937 visit with Symons, see GFAB, September 22, 1953. Her name appears under various spellings in Frick’s notes.
2. Margaret Symons to Grace Frick, MYP (1225). Chepstow was one of the first Norman keeps in Glamorgan.
3. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 115–16.
4. Yourcenar’s U.S. visa, stamped “3/2 Prof.,” was issued in Geneva on September 3, 1937, and was valid for a period of one year. It gives her last permanent residence as the island of Capri.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Joseph Massabuau, September 29, 1937, in Yourcenar, Correspondance avec Joseph Massabuau, 146–49.
6. “Notes of Social Activities in New York and Elsewhere,” New York Times, October 9, 1937.
7. Marguerite Yourcenar to Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, November 16, 1937, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 48. Atala is the mixed-race title character of an 1801 François-René Chateaubriand novella that was published after its author had visited the United States.
8. Deprez, Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA, 61.
9. GFC.
10. Alice Parker to Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar, October 14, 1956, MYC (3429).
11. Marguerite Yourcenar to Miss Sibley, February 2, 1962, MYP (1043).
12. Mary H. Marshall, “Memories of Marguerite Yourcenar,” Syracuse Library Associates Courier 25, no. 2 (1990): 31, 35, 41.
13. Ibid., 33.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar to Joseph Massabuau, February 5, 1938, in Correspondance, 153–54.
15. Marguerite Yourcenar to Joseph Massabuau, January 14, 1935, in Correspondance, 67. Yourcenar wrote no fewer than seven letters to Massabuau in that month of January alone, complaining of her “tragic” situation (55) and further noting, “Everything is so bleak for me. If I don’t manage to recover were it even half the amount due, I do not know how, with the income I have left, and all the obligations with which I am still burdened until the termination of the lease, I am going to get through the year” (65).
16. Marguerite Yourcenar to Joseph Massabuau, January 27, 1938, in Correspondance, 150–52.
17. Marguerite Yourcenar, quoted in John R. Wiggins, “Famous French Author Lives in Northeast Harbor,” Ellsworth (ME) American, April 11, 1974.
18. Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 321.
19. Willa Cather to Alexander Woollcott, October 15, 1931, MS Am 1449 (246), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Published with the permission of the Willa Cather Literary Trust.
20. Stock (publisher), letters and telegrams to Marguerite Yourcenar, MYC (3804).
21. M. Delamain to Marguerite Yourcenar, May 4, 1938, MYC (3804).
22. Willa Cather to Ferris Greenslet, August 23, 1945, MS Am 1925 (341), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Published with the permission of the Willa Cather Literary Trust.
23. Constantine Dimaras, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 108.
24. Françoise Pellen, “Translating Virginia Woolf into French,” in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst (London: Continuum, 2002), quoted in Bosseaux, How Does It Feel?, 55.
25. Whenever Yourcenar’s “euphonious inaccuracies” strayed too far from Woolf’s text, Pierre Nordon, the editor of Virginia Woolf, Romans et nouvelles, 1917–1941 (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1993), footnoted the passages in question and provided alternate translations. See Bosseaux, How Does It Feel?, 104–7.
26. It is even worth noting that Yourcenar’s working title better reflects the verbal nature of Cather’s Death Comes . . . than does the one chosen by Stock’s replacement translator, the French equivalent of Death of the Archbishop.
27. Andrew Jewell, abstract of “‘Curious Survivals’: The Letters of Willa Cather,” New Letters 74, no. 1 (2008): 154–75, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/132.
28. Cather, La Mort de l’archevêque.
29. WCCC, 1948, 28, WCA.
30. Yourcenar, Blues et gospels, 5. Deprez discusses Yourcenar’s relationship to American forms of protest and dissent in Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA, esp. chap. 2.
31. Pierre Desfons, dir., Saturday Blues, a 1984 documentary made for broadcast on the French television station TF1.
32. Yourcenar, Blues et gospels, 5–6.
33. Yourcenar’s settlement amounted to approximately $10,128.00 when she got it, the equivalent of more than $172,000.00 in 2018; see “Foreign Exchange Rates,” Federal Reserve Bulletin, May 1938, 418, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/FRB/1930s/frb_051938.pdf.
34. Yvon Bernier, “Marguerite Yourcenar: Le Québec et le Canada,” in Goslar, ed., Les Voyages de Marguerite Yourcenar, 169–91.
35. Marguerite Yourcenar, quoted in Bernier, “Marguerite Yourcenar: Le Québec et le Canada,” 171, 172–73.
36. Ibid., 174.
37. Lonoff, Croquis et griffonnis, 16–17. With the author’s generous permission, passages cited here and elsewhere are in her original English, although the page numbers referenced are from the French text.
38. Lonoff, Croquis et griffonnis, 17.
39. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Kali Beheaded,” in Oriental Tales, 119. The word “pointed” was omitted from the published translation.
40. Lonoff, Croquis et griffonnis, 17–18.
41. Ibid., 19.
42. Stein, Paris France, 109.
Chapter 7
1. Bill Landis (archivist, YMA), e-mail to the author, July 17, 2017.
2. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 119.
3. Ibid., 7–8.
4. I have made some minor punctuation and word choice changes here to my translation of this letter as it appeared in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 129. It is worth noting that Grace used the informal tu form to address Marguerite in this letter, as the two women did in life. This was a rare expression of familiarity for Yourcenar.
5. Yourcenar, Les Songes, in Essais et mémoires, 1540–41. Donald Flanell’s translation, Dreams and Destinies, leaves out the preface. Technically, Yourcenar’s twenty-eighth year began on June 8, 1930, and her thirty-third year ended on June 7, 1936. But it’s more likely that she means between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-three.
6. See, e.g., Yourcenar, Les Songes, in Essais et mémoires, 1586, 1598, 1602.
7. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xx.
8. The lines from Donne’s poems cited here follow Frick’s sometimes slightly wayward punctuation and spelling.
9. Bloom, John Donne, 15.
10. She made several trips in and out of Switzerland that summer, crossing the border at Domodossola. See Yourcenar’s passport from that era, MYC (569).
11. This novel “was inspired by an authentic episode from the years 1918–1919 that had been related to her a few days earlier, in Switzerland, by a friend of the principal character.” Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” xx.
12. Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” xx.
13. Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 141.
14. See chapter 18 of the present volume.
15. Yourcenar, Coup de Grâce, 138.
16. Ibid., 150–51.
17. See, e.g., Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 122–27; Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 141–45; and Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 199, 221–22, 226.
18. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 124.
19. See the discussion in Howard, From Violence to Vision, 141–45.
20. Frick’s inscribed copy of Coup de grâce, call number FC9.Y8850C 1939, is preserved at the Houghton Library.
21. Marguerite Yourcenar to Charles Du Bos, August 6, 1938, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 60.
22. Du Bos, Approximations, 117.
23. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 71.
24. Ibid., 142.
25. Elisabeth Frick to Grace Frick, July 24, 1938, MYP (1193).
26. Marguerite Yourcenar to Charles Du Bos, July 14, 1938, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 59.
Chapter 8
1. For this description of Château de Muzot, see GFAB, August 26, 1951.
2. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xxi.
3. Yourcenar, Réception de Marguerite Yourcenar à l’Académie royale, 43. The date of Calderon’s election comes from Jean-Claude van Aerde (Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature), e-mail to the author, May 15, 2008.
4. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 130, and fig. 18.
5. Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 229.
6. Yourcenar evokes Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne’s schoolgirl “love affair” with Jeanne de Vietinghoff in Dear Departed, 262–65.
7. Information on Lucy’s age comes from Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 15, 1983.
8. Nikos Calamaris, like André Embiricos and Odysseas Elytis, was a Greek surrealist writer.
9. Constantine Dimaras to Marguerite Yourcenar, November 24, 1937, MYP (212).
10. The French verb used by Dimaras is se volatiliser; one might go so far as to say that Lucy was “going down the drain.”
11. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 109.
12. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 10, 1983. With regard to the word “friend,” I noted in my journal at the time, “remember the care with which she uses this word.”
13. Information on Kyriakos’s and Yourcenar’s skiing abilities comes from Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 10, 1983.
14. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 130. It is highly likely that the baron’s last name was actually Gutmausthal. On November 5, 1966, a Herm[ ] Gutmausthal wrote to Yourcenar from Vienna regarding a possible visit with her in Maine. MYP (339).
15. “New Year’s in Kitzbühel, in the Tyrol. Marguerite Yourcenar ventures into Bavaria, then in March leaves Austria, already plunged in the prewar shadows, and finds herself in Athens”; Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” xxi.
16. “Easter 1939,” in Autobiographie III photo album, PPA.
17. Marguerite Yourcenar to Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, April 17, 1939, in Yourcenar, En 1939, 79.
18. Ibid. Yourcenar wrote to Boudot-Lamotte from Athens three times in February, beginning on the third of that month; once in March; twice in April; and once in May. Some of the Cavafy translations, along with Yourcenar’s essay on the poet, were published in the journal Mesures in January 1940.
19. A previous long stay in Greece (two months)—also spent in Athens at the Petit Palais—ended on September 30, 1936. For the detail about traveling to France on a freighter, see Yourcenar, En 1939, 81.
20. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 15, 1983.
21. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Self-Commentary,” in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 453. The maiden voyage of the Nieuw Amsterdam had actually occurred in 1938.
22. SS Manhattan, ship’s manifest, October 15, 1939, “New York, Passenger Lists, 1820–1957,” roll 641, Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/7488/NYT715_6411-0475?pid=1005897362&backurl=https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv%3D1%26dbid%3D7488%26h%3D1005897362%26tid%3D%26pid%3D%26usePUB%3Dtrue%26_phsrc%3DZcZ1%26_phstart%3DsuccessSource&treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=ZcZ1&_phstart=successSource&usePUBJs=true.
23. On June 18, 1939, she wrote to Jean Ballard from the Wagram; in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 62.
24. Marguerite Yourcenar to Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, July 19, 1939, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 63.
25. Yourcenar, “Self-Commentary,” 455.
26. Ibid.
27. GFC; Bill Landis (archivist, YMA), e-mail to the author, July 17, 2017.
28. Grace Frick, alumni information sheet, June 1, 1939, YMA.
29. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 10, 1983.
30. “German-American Bund,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/German-American-Bund.
31. Rosalind Rosenberg, “Virginia Gildersleeve: Opening the Gates,” Living Legacies, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Summer2001/Gildersleeve.html.
32. Wellesley College News, June 4, 1925, WCA.
33. Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” xxi–xxii. The lecture tour did not take place until the fall of 1940.
34. Blanchet-Douspis, L’Influence de l’histoire contemporaine, 20. “European Diagnosis” is a highly pessimistic historical and cultural analysis that was written when Yourcenar was very young. It was published in 1928 in the Revue de Genève.
35. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 157.
36. Marguerite Yourcenar, in Pierre Desfons, dir., Saturday Blues, a 1984 documentary made for broadcast on the French television station TF1.
37. Yourcenar, Blues et gospels, 7.
38. WCCC, 1950, WCA.
39. The English translation of Tristan L’Hermite’s poem appears in Johnson and Stokes, A French Song Companion, 121.
40. Marguerite Yourcenar, postcard (never sent) to Lucy Kyriakos, Easter 1940, MYP 372 (1076). St. Georges, or Agios Georgios, is a seaside village at the northeastern tip of the island of Euboea.
41. Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” xxii.
42. For both poems, see Yourcenar, Les Charités d’Alcippe, 18–19.
43. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 15, 1983.
44. Deirdre Wilson, telephone conversation with the author, May 8, 2009.
45. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 12, 1984.
46. Gladys Minear to Jean Hazelton, November 29, 1993, MFA.
Chapter 9
1. Edith A. Sprague to Howell Cheney, April 26, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
2. Phyllis Bartlett to Howell Cheney, April 24, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
3. University of Hartford, “Hartford College for Women,” http://library.hartford.edu/UniversityLibraries/archspeccoll/archives1/hcw.aspx.
4. A University for Hartford, a University for the World: A Short History of the University of Hartford, chap. 5, “A University for the World,” http://library.hartford.edu/aboutus/Publications/history/fivethre.htm.
5. Charles Hill to Helen Randall (outgoing Hartford Junior College administrator), April 28, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
6. Minor W. Latham to Hartford Junior College, March 21, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
7. Tucker Brooke to Howell Cheney, April 25, 1940, and Edith A. Sprague to Howell Cheney, April 26, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
8. J. J. Oppenheimer to Howell Cheney, May 2, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
9. Laura Lockwood to Howell Cheney, April 28, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
10. Martha Hale Shackford to Howell Cheney, April 26, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
11. William C. DeVane to Howell Cheney, April 29, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
12. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, May 1, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
13. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, May 8, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Lectures Given from February 1940 to June 1942,” faculty folder, SLCA; GFC.
15. Beatrice Kneeland, audio recording, November 23, 1982, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
16. Elizabeth Williams, audio recording, December 21, 1982, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
17. Oliver Butterworth, unpublished history of Hartford Junior College, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
18. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, July 17, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
19. Butterworth, unpublished history.
20. Theodora B. “Teddy” Newlands to the author, August 5, 1991.
21. “Art Reproductions Now Adorn Walls of Junior College,” Hartford Times, September 16, 1940.
22. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, n.d., HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
23. Untitled newspaper article, scrapbook of Paula Polivy, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
24. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, October 30, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
25. Ibid.
26. Miscellaneous newspaper articles saved by the Student Press Board, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
27. Grace Frick to the Hartford Junior College Board of Trustees, January 6, 1941, in Butterworth, unpublished history, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
28. Dorothy Pietrallo, audio recording, December 2, 1982, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
29. Jordon Pecile, “When France’s Immortal Lived among Us,” HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar, Christmas card to Dolly (Mrs. George) LaRue, [December 1946,] FFA.
31. Millicent Bolling Smith, audio recording, November 11, 1982, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
32. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, January 20, 1941, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), UHASC.
33. Frick not only supported her Jewish college “girls” but also sponsored a German Jewish couple’s immigration into the United States during World War II. Grace Frick to Paul and Gladys Minear, August 7, 1949, MFA.
34. GFC. Yourcenar was already identified as a lecturer on art at the school in late 1940, however, in a Hartford Courant article dated December 30, 1940, Press Board Scrapbook, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
35. Bernier, “Marguerite Yourcenar: Le Québec et le Canada,” 175–76.
36. Jerry Wilson, personal journal, March 17, 1980, Wilson family archives. Yourcenar also briefly mentioned her detainment to Matthieu Galey in response to a question about whether she had gone through difficult times in America: “Well, I’ve done time in prison, though I must say it was a very short time.” Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 236.
37. Inside back cover, GFAB, 1956.
38. Pressboard scrapbook, September 1940–June 1941, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
39. Kneeland audio recording.
40. “Dr. Woolley Speaker at Graduation,” unidentified clipping, [June] 19, 1941, Press Board Scrapboook, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
Chapter 10
1. Oliver Butterworth, unpublished history of Hartford Junior College, HCWC (ARCH051), UHASC.
2. “Hartford Junior College Now in Its Second Year,” Hartford Courant, November 3, 1940.
3. “Joins Faculty,” Hartford Times, August 18, 1941. Musson belonged to a school of women artists, and was known for painting members of “the smart set” of literature and the theater in the 1930s; see Musée Elise Rieuf, “Charlotte Musson: Biography,” http://www.musee-elise-rieuf.org/Biography-47.html. Her painting is now owned by the Musée Elise Rieuf in Massiac, France, whose proprietors have reliable evidence to support the approximate date given here; Sophie and Charles Rieuf, e-mail to the author, April 22, 2009.
4. “Will Teach New Art History Course Here,” Hartford Courant, August 17, 1941. Savigneau’s Inventing a Life, fig. 15, and Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 203, assign a date of “around 1936” to this photo. It’s possible, but Yourcenar has on the same jacket in the picture that she wore in the Kitzbühel snapshots from New Year’s 1939–40.
5. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 139.
6. Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 269–376.
7. Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 153–65.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Carnets de notes, 1942–1948,” in En pèlerin, 171–72.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jacques Kayaloff, January 20, 1942, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 73.
10. Deprez, Marguerite Yourcenar et les États-Unis, 9 and passim.
11. Yourcenar, Denier du rêve, 11–12. Dori Katz’s translation of this book, A Coin in Nine Hands, does not include the preface.
12. Jane Marcus’s introduction to the book notes that Woolf “wanted the American reader to respond to her attack on fascism because she published Three Guineas in the United States in a version especially for American readers with many changes, deletions, and additions.” Jane Marcus, “Introduction,” in Woolf, Three Guineas, xxxv.
13. Eleven books by Woolf still reside in the library of Petite Plaisance today.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Forces du passé et forces de l’avenir,” in En pèlerin, 55–62, and Essais et mémoires, 460–64.
15. Precisely when the essay was published remains uncertain. No copy of the French Consulate’s bulletin has ever been found.
16. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xxii.
17. Frick’s translation is preserved in MYP (1322) and MYC (185).
18. The first edition of Denier du rêve (Paris: Grasset, 1934) was substantially revised and reissued in 1959. Halley, Marguerite Yourcenar en poésie, points out that Yourcenar’s creative and political affinities grew more progressive over the decade of the 1930s.
19. Mann’s School for Barbarians, with an introduction by Thomas Mann, sold forty thousand copies in the first three months of its release; see Tóibín, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, 202.
20. Grace Frick, typescript of “Waiting for the Barbarians,” MYP (1354).
21. Constantine Dimaras, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 142.
22. Marian Murray, “French Author and Teacher Pleads for Greeks, Cites Heroic Struggle of Hellenic People,” Hartford Times, February 12, 1941.
23. Murray, “French Author and Teacher.” Mytillene is the capital of Lesbos.
24. Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” xix.
25. In fact, Yourcenar traveled a great deal during the 1930s to various European destinations, but her experience in Greece, like that of the emperor Hadrian, remained paramount.
26. Murray, “French Author and Teacher.”
27. Marguerite Yourcenar, quoted in Murray, “French Author and Teacher.”
28. Marguerite Yourcenar to Constantine Dimaras, July 1951, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 87–90.
29. Regarding this lecture tour, see “Mme. Yourcenar to Lecture on French Art,” Hartford Times, November 13, 1941; and American Association of Teachers of French, “Report of the Scholarship Committee,” French Review 15, no. 3 (1942): 270.
30. “Reception after Lecture for Dr., Mrs. Malinowski,” Hartford Courant, November 23, 1941; “Dr. Malinowski Lectures Tuesday at Junior College,” Hartford Courant, November 24, 1941.
31. “War No Part of Instinct, Yale Authority Testifies,” Hartford Times, November 26, 1941.
32. “Farmington Author Listed for Lecture,” Hartford Times, December 3, 1941.
33. “French Vocal Program at Junior College Today,” Hartford Courant, December 17, 1941.
Chapter 11
1. My description of Austin and the Wadsworth Atheneum draws on Lary Bloom, “Impresario’s Back Story of Daring,” New York Times, October 28, 2007, mailed to me by Frick and Yourcenar’s then 102-year-old friend Gladys Minear; Steve Courtney, “Elegant European Called ‘Reactionary’ Hartford Home,” Hartford Courant, August 4, 2002; Gaddis, Magician of the Modern; and Jane Roy Brown, “A Legacy of Firsts on Display at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” Boston Globe, November 1, 2006, http://www.boston.com/travel/articles/2006/11/01/a_legacy_of_firsts_on_display_at_the_wadsworth_atheneum.
2. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern, 353.
3. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 141. Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 158.
4. Marguerite Yourcenar, “À propos d’un divertissement et en hommage à un magicien,” in Théâtre I, 138.
5. Le Corbusier, quoted in Gaddis, Magician of the Modern, 288.
6. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern, 353.
7. Yourcenar, “À propos d’un divertissement,” 137.
8. The text of Frick’s original translation has been lost, but Dori Katz’s later version, The Little Mermaid, was published in Yourcenar, Plays, 149–64.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jacques Kayaloff, January 20, 1942, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 72.
10. “Mme. Yourcenar Writes Play on Folk Theme,” Hartford Times, May 16, 1942.
11. Yourcenar, “À propos d’un divertissement,” 145.
12. Marguerite Yourcenar, card to Truda Kaschmann, December 13, 1979, Wadsworth Atheneum Archives.
13. Yourcenar, “À propos d’un divertissement,” 143.
14. See Yourcenar’s note on the clipping “A. Everett Austin, Jr., Presents the Renowned Elizabethan Tragedy ‘’Tis Pity’ by John Ford” in Printed Materials, 1937–1993, MYC 372.2 (579).
15. Yourcenar, “À propos d’un divertissement,” 143.
16. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern, 358.
17. “Wellesley Club to Be Entertained,” Hartford Times, February 11, 1942; “Wellesley Club to Meet at Junior College,” Hartford Courant, February 11, 1942.
18. “The Alcestis of Euripides,” translated by Gilbert Murray, presented by Society Alpha Kappa Chi, May 25–26, 1923, page from the handbill given out for the performance, AKX: Programs (1893–1953), WCA.
19. Society column, Hartford Courant, February 14, 1942, 7.
20. Financial Papers, 1943–53, MYC (562).
21. See, e.g., Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, June 16, 1942, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC; and Ella W. Shaw to Miss Frick, June 27 and July 27, 1942, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
22. Grace Frick, postcard to Howell Cheney, August 11, 1942, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
23. Gladys Minear to the author, December 14, 2008, MFA.
24. Paul Minear, in Paul and Gladys Minear, interview with the author, April 6, 2004.
25. To Matthieu Galey, for example, she said that on an island “you feel that you’re standing on the border between the human world and the rest of the universe.” Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 103.
26. Yourcenar, Sources II, 273.
27. Thanks to the late David Nolf, whose mother, Marie Garrett Nolf, now owns Hysom’s Cabin, also sometimes known as Hysom Cottage.
28. Elaine Higgins Reddish (proprietor of Higgins Store), interview with the author, June 15, 2002.
29. Grace Frick, audio recording by Donald Harris, November 27, 1977, HFA.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Examen d’Alceste,” in Théâtre II, 101.
31. Marguerite Yourcenar, preface to La Petite Sirène, in Théâtre I, 146.
32. Yourcenar, Le Mystère d’Alceste, 109.
Chapter 12
Epigraph: Grace Frick once called the Satan of Paradise Lost “a magnificent figure,” telling Donald Harris that “Milton set out to make him a devil, but he got so fascinated with him. . . . It was harder to describe a good man like Jesus.” Grace Frick, audio recording by Donald Harris, November 27, 1977, HFA.
1. Marguerite Yourcenar, interview by Jacques Chancel, Radioscopie, France Inter, June 11–15, 1979.
2. “Hartford Junior College Starts New Year Auspiciously,” Hartford Times, September 22, 1941.
3. Informal history of the class of 1944, Highlander, Yearbook Collection (ARCH149), UHASC.
4. See, e.g., Susan Barlow, “Howell Cheney,” Manchester Historical Society, http://www.manchesterhistory.org/reprints/MHS3_HowellCheney.html.
5. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, May 8, 1940, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
6. This letter, on Hartford Junior College Dean’s Office letterhead, is mistakenly dated 1940, at which time Frick was still at Barnard College.
7. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, February 17, [1940,] HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
8. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, July 1, 1941, HCWC (ARCH051), HUASC.
9. “Local Junior College Names Secretary,” Hartford Times, March 23, 1942.
10. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, May 5, 1942, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
11. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, June 16, 1942, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
12. Ibid.
13. Oliver Butterworth, unpublished history, HCWC (ARCH051), HUASC.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar to Christine Lyman (Hartford Junior College employee), n.d., HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
15. “Junior College to Show Mexican, French Movies,” Hartford Courant, February 8, 1943, 12.
16. Howell Cheney to Clement C. Hyde, January 22, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
17. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, January 25, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
18. Elizabeth Rogers Payne, ed., “Wellesley in the World,” Wellesley, March 1943, 160.
19. Frick family documents, FFA.
20. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, April 2, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC. Twenty-six years later, Frick had not forgotten Howell Cheney. In the spring of 1969, with antiwar and antiestablishment sentiment running high among American and French youth, Grace told Gladys and Paul Minear that she sympathized with their son Larry’s “stone-age President of Ohio State,” adding that “Mr. Cheney, of Hartford Junior College, was pre-Neanderthal.” Grace Frick to Paul and Gladys Minear, March [n.d.], 1969, MFA.
21. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, January 27, 1943 (not received until April 13, 1943), HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
22. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, April 20, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
23. Death certificate of George A. LaRue, Missouri State Archives.
24. Jerry Wilson, personal journal, March 26, 1980, Wilson family archives.
25. GFAB, February 8, 1945.
26. See Stephen Trachtenberg to Marguerite Yourcenar, September 8 and 15, 1980, MYC (3928); and Stephen Trachtenberg to Jean Lunt, June 17, 1981, MYC (3928).
27. Marguerite Yourcenar to Stephen Trachtenberg, September 9, 1980, MYC (5304).
28. Marguerite Yourcenar to Beatrice Kneeland, May 19, 1987, Wadsworth Atheneum Archives.
29. Grace Frick to Howell Cheney, May 8, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
30. Howell Cheney to Ruth Houghton (Wellesley Placement Office), ca. June 11, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
31. Dorothy Pietrallo, audio recording, December 2, 1982, HCWC (ARCH051), HUASC.
32. “Austin, A[rthur] Everett, Jr., ‘Chick,’” Dictionary of Art Historians, https://dictionaryofarthistorians.org/austine.htm.
33. Howell Cheney to Grace Frick, June 7, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
34. Students of Hartford Junior College to Howell Cheney, June 14, 1943, HCCHJCC (ARCH042), HUASC.
35. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Grace Frick’s annotated copy, PPA.
36. Ruth Hall, Esq., to Grace Frick, January 8, 1943, MYC (562).
Chapter 13
1. Mary Marshall to Grace Frick, June 13, 1944, MYP (1214).
2. Probate Court document number 53,435, Jackson County, Missouri.
3. Financial Papers, 1943–53, MYC (562).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Margaret Smith to Marguerite Yourcenar, July 1, 1943, MYC (562).
7. Thomas Hughes to Marguerite Yourcenar, July 11, 1943, MYC (377).
8. Thomas Hughes to Marguerite Yourcenar, July 25, 1944, MYC (377).
9. On April 28, 1943, a document was filed by the law offices of Bowersock, Fizzell and Rhodes of Kansas City appointing Fred to take over for Gage as executor of LaRue’s will. Gage was already overseas. Probate Court document number 53,435, Jackson County, Missouri.
10. Ruth Hall to Grace Frick, May 6, 1943, MYC (562).
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Antoinette Hoffherr, “The Making of Hadrian’s Memoirs,” MYC (862).
15. See GFC; and GFAB, 1944 and 1966.
16. GFAB, 1945.
17. Yourcenar’s salary for the year 1942–43 was $1,300; Faculty folder, SLCA.
18. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 12, 1984.
19. Probate Court document number 106,774, Jackson County, Missouri.
20. Ibid.
21. Chung, Grants for Scholarships, 238–40.
22. George A. and Dolly F. LaRue Trust Form 990, ProPublica, https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/436122865.
Chapter 14
1. Kayaloff, of Armenian descent, emigrated from Russia to Paris after World War I and then to New York; “Jacques Kayaloff, 85, Is Dead; Ex-Head of Louis Dreyfus Co.,” New York Times, September 18, 1983.
2. GFAB, January 24, 1949.
3. Ibid., 1944.
4. Ibid., 1944–46.
5. Barranger, Margaret Webster, 121.
6. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 173.
7. Barbara Kaplan, “Becoming Sarah Lawrence,” https://archive.is/5I2L7.
8. “Madame Marguerite Yourcenar,” information sheet, SLCA.
9. André Morize to Dr. Duggan, February 16, 1941, SLCA.
10. Louis Barillet, comments on Marguerite Yourcenar, June 5, 1942, SLCA.
11. Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life, 138.
12. McCarthy, The Groves of Academe, 64.
13. Reading list, September 15–October 15, unspecified year, SLCA.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 13, 1983.
15. See, e.g., GFAB, April 20, 1944.
16. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 95.
17. Marguerite Yourcenar, interview by Jacques Chancel, Radioscopie, France Inter, June 11–15, 1979.
18. Marguerite Yourcenar, interview by Françoise Faucher, Femme d’aujourd’hui (TV series), excerpted in Delcroix, Portrait d’une voix, 144. Yourcenar actually taught for nine academic years, fall 1942–spring 1950 and 1952–53.
19. Phyllis Rothschild Farley, conversation with Sue Lonoff de Cuevas, received via e-mail to the author, April 2, 2009.
20. Jane Bond, telephone interview with the author, February 2, 2008; J. Max Bond Sr. was dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University during Jane’s two years at Sarah Lawrence. He was later president of the University of Liberia.
21. Bond interview.
22. Marguerite Yourcenar, audio recording of an interview by Maurice Dumay, March 6, 1980, PPA.
23. Charlotte Pomerantz Marzani, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 165–66.
24. Donna Levinsohn to the author, October 20, 1993.
25. Donna Levinsohn, e-mail to the author, December 4, 2007; GFAB, 1944.
26. Marguerite Yourcenar, faculty report of Marianne Mosevius, March 3, 1944, DLA.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar, faculty report of Marianne Mosevius, April 25, 1944, DLA.
28. Marguerite Yourcenar, faculty report of Marianne Mosevius, October 27, 1944, DLA.
29. Marianne Mosevius, handwritten note to herself, October 26, 1945, DLA.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marianne Levinsohn, February 5, 1949, DLA. The maple syrup was mail-ordered from Mrs. Wiggins’s Country Store in Northampton, Massachusetts. Yourcenar told Levinsohn she knew “the old Negro who harvests and grinds the [buckwheat flour] grains: he is a very noble personage.”
31. GFAB, August 23, 1944.
32. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xxii.
33. GFAB, August 22, 1944.
34. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Three Greek Myths in Palladian Perspective I,” trans. Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, Chimera 4, no. 3 (1946): 42–51; Marguerite Yourcenar, “Three Greek Myths in Palladian Perspective II,” trans. Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, Chimera 4, no. 4 (1946): 6–19.
35. GFAB, August 29, 1944.
36. “College Faculty Spends Summer Imaginatively,” Sarah Lawrence College Campus, October 4, 1944. Dramatis Personae was a collection of three plays—Le Mystère d’Alceste, Intermède d’Ariane, and Électre ou la Chute des masques—that Yourcenar hoped to publish soon.
Chapter 15
1. Keeping in mind that Yourcenar was identified as “Belguin” when she sailed to America in 1939, however, it is most interesting to note that she described herself as having been naturalized “under the Belgian quota” in a March 22, 1952, letter to the American Consul in Paris, MYP (1377).
2. Grace Frick, audio recording by Donald Harris, November 27, 1977, HFA.
3. Artemis Leontis, “Eva Palmer’s Distinctive Greek Journey,” in Kolokotroni and Mitsi, eds., Women Writing Greece, 162. Yourcenar once wrote to Barney that “Mount Desert has forgotten the two nymphs, Eva and Natalie, who ran along the beaches and should be part of its legend.” Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 29, 1963, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 189.
4. Grace Frick to Natalie Barney, December 1955, NCBC 2362.
5. As Yourcenar told Matthieu Galey, “Grace was known in the village as the ‘lady on horseback who’s looking for a house.’” Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 104.
6. Elaine Higgins Reddish (proprietor of Higgins Store), interview with the author, June 15, 2002.
7. Jerry Wilson, personal journal, March 19, 1980. Wilson family archives.
8. GFAB, August 5, 1948.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, date unknown. Jerry Wilson mentions what is probably the same event in his journal on March 17, 1980, when he speaks of “the play acting done in the jardin imitating a tree.”
10. The phone number was “Trafalgar 7-4050”; GFAB, 1946.
11. “Visitor Tells of War’s Effect on European Children,” Vassar Miscellany News, October 18, 1941.
12. In a 1942 document preserved in the SLCA, Yourcenar stated under the heading “Academical [sic] Degrees”: “None except the French B.A. degree. Education by private tutors. As a free student, and without intention of accumulating credits, has followed courses at the universities of Aix, Geneva, and Bologna.”
13. GFAB, 1944.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. Andrée Royon went on to practice psychoanalysis in New York City.
16. GFAB, 1945.
17. GFAB, January 10, 1945.
18. Marguerite Yourcenar, handwritten codicil to her will, November 18, 1946, MYC (562).
19. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marianne Levinsohn, February 5, 1949, DLA.
20. Ibid.
21. GFAB, March 18, 1949.
22. GFAB, August 26, 1949.
23. GFAB, August 28, 1949.
24. Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 342–43.
25. Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 310.
26. Officially, they went to Rome to start the all-important English translation of Hadrian—on-site, as it were. Marguerite Yourcenar to Harold Taylor, February 3, 1952, SLCA.
27. GFAB, March 8, 1952.
28. Charlotte Pomerantz Marzani, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 166.
29. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marianne Levinsohn, February 5, 1949. There are no letters to or from Levinsohn in the Houghton Library’s public archive. One can only hope that some will come to light in 2037, when the sealed papers of Yourcenar are released. Tragically, Marianne Levinsohn, who had been through so much in her youth, was killed in a car crash at the age of fifty-three while driving her son home from Yale University in 1975. Donna Levinsohn, e-mail to the author, December 4, 2007.
30. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 392.
31. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 19, 1983.
32. Author’s personal journal entry, August 22, 1983.
33. GFAB, September 7, 1955.
34. Grace Frick to Pamela Frick, June 25, 1955, FFA.
35. GFAB, January 15, 1956.
36. David Peckham, interview with the author, July 7, 2008.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
Chapter 16
1. Kathryn James (reference librarian at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University), e-mail to the author, April 19, 2006.
2. Marguerite Yourcenar to Ruth Hall, May 29, 1950, MYC (562).
3. Marguerite Yourcenar to Harold Taylor, October 23, 1949, SLCA.
4. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, n.d., MFA.
5. Chauncey Brewster Tinker (1876–1963) had worked with Hall to create the Rare Book Room. Marjorie Wynne (supervisor of the Rare Book Room after Hall’s retirement) to the author, June 9, 2006.
6. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, n.d., MFA.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar to Ruth Hall, May 29, 1950, MYC (562).
10. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 12, 1984.
11. Comptoir National d’Escompte to Marguerite Yourcenar, February 28, 1950, MYC (560).
12. Marguerite Yourcenar to Ruth Hall, May 29, 1950, MYC (562).
Chapter 17
1. Durlin Lunt, interview with the author, June 30, 2008; Elizabeth Renault, interview with the author, July 1, 2008.
2. Grace Frick to Ruth Hall, October 20, 1950, MYC (575).
3. Chancel, Marguerite Yourcenar: Radioscopie, 12.
4. Marguerite Yourcenar to Ruth Hall, September 13, 1950, MYC (562).
5. GFAB, 1951; Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, [August 20–27,] 1951, MFA.
6. The owners on September 29, 1950, were Cora A. Kimball (a widow), Margaret M. Kimball (unmarried), Loren E. Kimball Jr., and Marion M. Kimball (Loren’s wife). Hancock County, Maine, Registry of Deeds, 466.
7. The historian is Mrs. Carl E. Kelley; Maine Memory Network, “Northeast Harbor: From Rustic to Rusticators,” http://www.mainememory.net/bin/Features?f=268&n_id=5&supst=Exhibits.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 22, 1983.
9. Willie Granston, “Old Houses in Northeast Harbor,” unpublished manuscript based on research in the Northeast Harbor Public Library Archives, 2008, courtesy of the author. Information on the wedding of Kimball and Gilpatrick came from Jim Dangel, “Gilpatrick Family Cards,” http://www.dangel.net/GilpatrickWebCards/WC70_125.HTM (accessed in February 2017), though the web page is no longer extant.
10. When Acadia National Park came into being, Brown Mountain was renamed Norumbega.
11. Jean Lunt, “History of the House,” 1988, PPA.
12. H. W. Small, A History of the Town of Swan’s Island, Maine, 2nd ed., http://www.swansisland.org/small.pdf.
13. GFAB, March 5, 1951.
14. Vaun Gillmor to Marguerite Yourcenar, July 10, 1950, MYC (2050).
15. Marguerite Yourcenar to Vaun Gillmor, July 13, 1950, MYC (2050).
16. Delcroix, Portrait d’une voix, 204; GFAB, October 24, 1955.
17. GFAB, October 24, 1955.
18. Patrick Chasse, conversation with the author, August 8, 2009.
19. Shirley McGarr, conversation with the author, November 24, 2009.
20. C. Ronald Bechtle (George Korkmadjian’s son-in-law), conversation with the author, July 26, 2001.
21. André Fraigneau, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 189.
22. John Barrett to Marguerite Yourcenar, March 12, 1951, MYC (2050).
23. GFAB, March 26, 1951.
24. GFAB, January 18, 1945.
25. GFAB, April 19, 1950.
26. Levon Avdoyan, “‘Magistra Studentorum per Armeniam et Byzantium’: Nina G. Garsoïan (1923–),” in Chance, ed., Women Medievalists and the Academy, 803.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar, 1963 list of busts and paintings of herself, MYC (563).
28. Marguerite Yourcenar to Ruth Hall, April 27, 1951, MYC (562).
Chapter 18
1. Grace Frick, alumni information sheet, May 14, 1951, YMA.
2. GFAB, July 2, 1951.
3. For the first correct mention of Yourcenar’s birthday, see GFAB, June 8, 1960.
4. Marguerite Yourcenar to Joseph Breitbach, April 7, 1951, MYC (4314).
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jacques Kayaloff, December 31, 1960, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 520–21.
6. GFAB, June 28, 1951.
7. Natalie Barney to Grace Frick, November 16, 1963, MYC (5401).
8. Grace Frick, “Notes about Barney,” MYC (289).
9. GFAB, July 3, 1951.
10. Souhami, Wild Girls, 60.
11. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, June 1952 [before June 10], MYC (1032).
12. Stein, Things as They Are.
13. Karren LaLonde Alenier, “The Steiny Road to Operadom,” Scene4, August 2014, https://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/2014/aug-2014/0814/karrenlalondealenier0814.html; Natalie Barney, quoted in Rodriguez, Wild Heart, 337.
14. Grace Frick to Natalie Barney, July 9, 1952, NCBC.
15. Ibid.
16. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, June 1, 1952, MYC (1032).
17. Jean Racine, Phaedra, translated by A. S. Kline, 2003, http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/PhaedraActI.htm: “Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée : / C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée.”
18. Rodriguez, Wild Heart, 340.
19. [Delarue-Mardrus,] Nos Secrètes Amours, PPA. Yourcenar also placed question marks next to lines suggesting that lesbian love was “impossible” or prohibited.
20. Regarding Barney’s early trip to Lesbos, see Miron Grindea, ed., “The Amazon of Letters: A World Tribute to Natalie Barney,” special issue of ADAM International Review 30, no. 299 (1962).
21. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, August 10, 1952, MYC (1032), in Barney’s original English.
22. Marguerite Yourcenar, postcard to Natalie Barney, August [29], 1952, NCBC 2359.
23. DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 298.
24. GFAB, July 23, 1951.
25. Grace Frick, postcard to Gladys Minear, July 27, 1951, MFA.
26. GFAB, August 5, 1951. “The older Madame Finch” stayed on at Vufflens until September.
27. GFAB, September 4, 1951.
28. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 213–16.
29. M. Godemart to Marguerite Yourcenar, September 24, 1951, quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 215.
30. GFAB, November 4 and 7, 1951.
31. Jean Hazelton, interview with the author August 8, 2006. The letter was written on October 17, 1951.
32. Ibid.
33. Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte to Marguerite Yourcenar, December 9, 1951, MYC (2080).
34. Constantine Dimaras to Marguerite Yourcenar, August 5, 1951, MYP (212).
35. DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 5.
36. Ibid., 296.
37. Ibid., 297.
38. Howard, From Violence to Vision, 117–49.
39. DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 297–98.
Chapter 19
1. Florence Codman to Marguerite Yourcenar, January 15, 1952, MYP (170).
2. GFAB, January 19, 1952.
3. Angel Gurria-Quintana, “Collective Madness,” Financial Times, November 13, 2004.
4. Ibid. See also Smith, ed., The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, 19–20.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Max Daireaux, September 11, 1951, in Yourcenar, D’Hadrien à Zénon, 45.
6. Bearing witness to that early stage of Grace and Marguerite’s romance are two line drawings of La Residenza and, aptly enough for two women who loved a blazing fire, its fireplace logo, in Yourcenar’s autobiographical albums, PPA.
7. Frick’s green leather-bound 1952 edition of Alexis is preserved at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, FC9.Y8850.929ab.
8. GFAB, May 2, 1952.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Andalusia, or the Hesperides,” in That Mighty Sculptor, Time, 171–72.
10. Robert Ochs to Marguerite Yourcenar, June 1952, MYC (3516).
11. Yourcenar, Réception de Marguerite Yourcenar à l’Académie royale, 43.
12. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 224.
13. Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 315.
14. “This is the letter from Grace Frick I spoke to you about the other day,” Robert Ho wrote to me in 2004. “Nancy and I have treasured it for all these years. Both of us were deeply touched by her reaching out to us at an emotionally tumultuous time—particularly for Nancy. The letter helped ease my entry into this community which is now home for me and our children. It says so much of Grace and what she valued and represented in her life.” Robert Ho to the author, June 30, 2004. Bob Ho succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy-seven on February 17, 2012.
15. It may not be coincidental that it was after twelve years with Frick that Yourcenar made unity and stability, as Jeanine Alesch has emphasized, the hallmarks of Hadrian’s empire. See, e.g., Alesch, The Other/Reader, 79.
16. Jean Hazelton, interview with the author, August 8, 2006.
17. Ibid.
18. Cather, Willa Cather on Writing, 109.
19. I mention Yourcenar’s astrological sign, that of the restless Twins, in part because she herself was interested in astrology. She had birth charts drafted for Hadrian and Zeno. Her literary oeuvre owes some of its most moving scenes to the tension between and the movement toward a resolution of seemingly irreconcilable dualities.
20. GFAB, October 11, 1952. The woman was Mrs. Reginald Allen.
21. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 225.
22. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, October 15, 1952, NCBC 2360; Marguerite Yourcenar to Victoria Ocampo, December 22, 1952, MS Span 117 (791), Houghton Library, Harvard University. While translating Hadrian, Frick kept incredibly detailed notes on the spelling of terms and proper nouns, complete with information about the efforts she made to verify each one, the reasons why specific forms were chosen, and the places where corrections were made in the manuscript along the way. Stacked one atop the other, they would make a pile about ten inches high. MYC (236).
23. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, June 15, 1953, NCBC 2365.
24. Natalie Barney to “My Dears,” June 21, 1953, MYC (1032).
25. Grace Frick to Mary Lou Aswell, March 3, 1953, MYC (5439).
26. Grace Frick to Roberta Todd, April 22, 1959, WCA.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, October 2, 1971, MYC (4346). Quoted in Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 324–25.
28. Gerald Sykes, “In Imperial Rome,” New York Times, November 21, 1954, 6.
29. Geoffrey Bruun, review of Memoirs of Hadrian, New Republic 131 (1954): 23.
30. Robert Parris, review of Memoirs of Hadrian, Nation 179 (1954): 554.
31. Frank White, “Hadrian and the World That Became Turkey,” Turkish Daily News, July 21, 2008, http://www.armeniandiaspora.com/showthread.php?139107-ANKARA-Hadrian-And-The-World-That-Became-Turkey.
32. Dorothy Sinclair, review of Memoirs of Hadrian, Library Journal 79 (1954): 2, 100.
33. Geoffrey Bruun, “Hadrian’s Story as That Complex Emperor Might Have Written It,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, November 21, 1954, 1.
34. Memoirs of Hadrian was on the New York Times best-seller list from December 12, 1954, through April 24, 1955.
Chapter 20
1. Natalie Barney, postcard to “Dear Friends,” September 14, 1953, MYC (1032).
2. GFAB, August–September 1953.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar, audio recording of an interview by Maurice Dumay, March 1980, PPA.
4. Yourcenar, Quoi? L’Éternité, 278.
5. GFAB, November 16, 1953.
6. GFAB, December 31, 1953, entry in 1954 daybook.
7. Palmieri, In Adamless Eden, 263.
8. Sarah Lawrence College, “Sarah Lawrence under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era,” https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/archives/exhibits/mccarthyism/.
9. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 97.
10. GFAB, December 13, 1952.
11. Margaret Barratin to the American Consul in Paris, March 20, 1954, NCBC 2374.
12. Grace Frick to the American Consul in Paris, March 22, 1954, MYP (1377).
13. Marguerite Yourcenar to the American Consul in Paris, March 22, 1954, MYP (1377).
14. Grace Frick to Margaret Chase Smith, March 22, 1954, MYP (1047).
15. Ibid. See also GFAB, September 25, 1952.
16. McCarthy, “No News, or, What Killed the Dog,” in On the Contrary, 35.
17. Grace Frick to Margaret Chase Smith, March 22, 1954, MYP (1047).
18. Grace Frick to Natalie Barney, March 23, 1954, NCBC 2376.
19. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, November 10, 1962, MYC (4204).
20. GFAB, April 17, 1954.
21. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, May 6, 1954, NCBC 2377.
22. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, December 29, 1954, NCBC 2383.
23. Bussy was a member of the brilliant British Strachey family, some of whom were regulars of the Bloomsbury group. She would eventually work side by side with the founder of Les Ruches, Marie Souvestre, at Allenswood Academy outside London. Their most renowned pupil was the future American first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
24. Jacqueline Audry directed this film based on a screenplay written by Colette. After a 1951 release in France, Olivia acquired its “fallacious” title in the United States, where, like The Well of Loneliness, it was censored.
25. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, April 17, 1954, MYP (42).
26. Marguerite Yourcenar (writing for the couple), postcard to Natalie Barney, May 29, 1954, NCBC 2377.
27. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, sometime before June 10, 1952, MYC (1032); Louÿs, Les Chansons de Bilitis.
28. Marguerite Yourcenar, postcard to Natalie Barney, June 28, 1954, NCBC 2380.
29. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, April 21, 1954, MYP (42).
30. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, June 6, 1954, MYP (42).
31. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, June 20, 1954, MYC (1032).
32. Marguerite Yourcenar, postcard to Natalie Barney, June 28, 1954, NCBC 2380.
33. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, postmarked September 27, 1954, MYP(42).
34. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, June 10, 1955, MYC (1032).
35. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, September 12, 1952, MYC (1032).
36. See, e.g., Natalie Barney to Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar, July 21, 1953, MYC (1032); and Natalie Barney to Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar, April 21, 1954, MYP (42).
37. GFAB, December 15, 1954.
38. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, November 1, 1952, MYC (1032).
39. Natalie Barney, postcard to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, November 30, 1953, MYC (1032).
40. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, June 10, 1955, MYC (1032).
41. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, August 8, 1955, MYC (1032); Barney’s original English.
42. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, late February 1956, MYC (1032); partially my own translation.
43. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, April 7, 1956, MYC (1032).
44. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, April 6, 1955, MYC (1032).
45. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, June 20, 1954, MYC (1032).
46. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, April 6, 1955, MYC (1032); Barney’s original English.
47. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 5, 1955, NCBC 2384.
48. Marguerite Yourcenar, Christmas letter to Natalie Barney, [December 1955,] NCBC 2361.
Chapter 21
1. Marguerite Yourcenar to Constantine Dimaras, June 17, 1954, MYC (4459).
2. GFAB, July 3, 1954.
3. Both essays are included in That Mighty Sculptor, Time.
4. “Around 1955,” said Yourcenar to Claude Servan-Schreiber in 1980; see Delcroix, comp., Portrait d’une voix, 284.
5. GFAB, September 5, 1954.
6. GFAB, September 9–10, 1954.
7. GFAB, September 10–16, 1954. Jean Hazelton recalled a less dramatic but fundamentally similar incident that occurred on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. She and Grace were walking toward a restaurant for lunch when an elegantly dressed Frenchwoman passed them headed the other way. Grace turned to Jean and said, “She’s crying!” And off she went, chasing after the sobbing passerby to see what she could do to help!
8. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, March 11, 1956, in Yourcenar, D’Hadrien à Zénon, 513. The award was not received until 1963, however.
9. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern, 408.
10. GFAB, December 16, 1954.
11. GFAB, January 5, 1955.
12. GFAB, March 11, 1955.
13. GFAB, January 29, 1955.
14. GFAB, February 19, 1955.
15. GFAB, March 3, 1955.
16. The volume was Hommage de la France à Thomas Mann.
17. GFAB, April 13, 1955.
18. GFAB, February 16, 1955.
19. See Lonoff, Croquis et griffonnis, 41–53.
20. GFAB, February 18, 1955.
21. Élie Grekoff to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, November 26, 1956, MYP (332); Élie Grekoff to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, April 26, 1955, MYP (332).
22. GFAB, March 6, 1955.
23. GFAB, March 7, 1955.
24. The double transgression of “Mlle Longueville” had been to overstay her welcome and to show no interest in Thomas Mann’s letter to Yourcenar. GFAB, February 28, 1955.
25. GFAB, March 8, 1955.
26. Élie Grekoff to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, November 26, 1956, MYP (332).
27. See, for instance, Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 93.
28. GFAB, January 11, 1955.
29. GFAB, April 4, 1955.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Traversée sur le Bathory,” unpublished typescript, MYC (524). Lurs are curved horns cast in bronze, six or more feet long, that may have been used to call warriors to battle.
31. Morton Axboe, e-mail to the author, June 30, 2009.
32. Morton Axboe, e-mail to the author, November 25, 2008.
33. Lonoff, Croquis et griffonnis, 50.
34. Marguerite Yourcenar to Mrs. Kenneth B. Murdock, August 19, 1966, MYP (546).
35. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, May 26, 1955, MFA.
36. GFAB, May 18, 1955.
37. Kajsa Andersson, “Présence scandinave dans l’oeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar,” Romansk Forum 16, no. 2 (2002): 246.
38. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, May 26, 1955, MFA.
39. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 255.
40. GFAB, May 27–29, 1955.
Chapter 22
1. GFAB, June 12 and 22, 1955.
2. GFAB, October 21, 1955.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Lambert, September 23, 1956, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 125.
4. GFAB, June 29, 1955.
5. GFAB, August 18, 1955.
6. Florence Codman to Marguerite Yourcenar, May 25, 1953, MYP (170).
7. GFAB, August 25, 1955. The letter has apparently not been preserved.
8. GFAB, October 28 and 29, 1955.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar to Henri Balmelle, April 2, 1959, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 139.
10. The translation, deemed “remarkable” by Yourcenar’s “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xxv, was entitled “Humanism and Occultism in Thomas Mann.” It came out in 1956 in the Partisan Review.
11. Florence Codman to Grace Frick, January 19, 1956, MYP (170).
12. GFAB, August 29, 1955.
13. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, October 16, 2005.
14. GFAB, July 27, 1956.
15. Richard Savage, telephone interview with the author, October 2, 2007.
16. There were also prizes of fifteen, ten, and five dollars. Richard Savage, telephone interview with the author, October 2, 2007.
17. GFAB, February 19–21, 1950.
18. Grace Frick to Katharine and Pamela Frick, January 16, 1955, MYP (1200).
19. Deirdre Wilson, telephone conversation with the author, November 20, 2009.
20. Lalonde, Un Jardin entouré de murailles.
21. Kaighn Smith, interview with the author, September 27, 2008.
22. Grace Frick, card to Paul and Gladys Minear, February 26, 1956, MFA.
23. Hall Willkie, telephone interview with the author, June 9, 2010.
24. Ibid.
25. Julia Willkie, telephone interview with the author, June 20, 2010.
26. Ibid.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 18, 1956, MYC (1032).
28. GFAB, October 12–30, 1956.
29. GFAB, November 2–4, 1956.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar to Aziz Izzet, November 27, 1957, in Yourcenar, Une Volonté sans fléchissement, 179.
31. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, December 27, 1956, NCBC 2386.
32. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 227–28.
33. GFAB, November 11, 1956.
34. Shirley McGarr, interview with the author, September 4, 2005.
35. Marguerite Yourcenar to Paul and Gladys Minear, December 23, 1975, MFA.
36. See, e.g., Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 4–5.
37. In Scandinavia the holiday is called Saint Lucia’s Day, but here I follow Frick and Yourcenar’s English spelling: “We stopped in Copenhagen to finish some literary work and had a Danish Christmas at Elsinore, having had Saint Lucy’s Day in Stockholm with crown of candles and awakening to coffee and song”; Marguerite Yourcenar to Märta Modeen, January 11, 1954, in Yourcenar, D’Hadrien à Zénon, 291.
38. In 1952 they spent all but the very end of December in their Scarsdale, New York, apartment, returning to Maine only briefly. In 1953 and 1954 they were in Europe. Over the holidays in 1955, the water main supplying Petite Plaisance froze three times, putting a big crimp in the festivities. GFAB, 1956 and 1957.
39. See, e.g., Delcroix, comp., Portrait d’une voix, 251.
40. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, November 10, 1962, MYC (4204): “early in the summer, we took a trip lasting nearly two months that brought us to Scandinavia (one of our favorite places: order and beauty, and great open spaces) and for a few days for the first time to Leningrad.” For a Francophile, “order and beauty” is an unmistakable reference to Charles Baudelaire’s famous “Invitation to the Voyage” and its invocation of luxury and pleasure.
41. GFAB, December 12–13, 1956; see also December 13, 1963.
42. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 110.
43. Shirley McGarr, telephone interview with the author, November 24, 2009.
44. In a folder of holiday recipes saved by Yourcenar, MYC (228), one finds, along with other international fare, a whole page of “Swedish Christmas Food.”
45. GFAB, December 21, 1956.
46. Buttons, thank-you card to Monsieur, December 24, 1956, MYP (1371).
47. Yourcenar’s status as chief cook earned her another playful gift-related card in the mid-1950s. This one was a Valentine from Grace and Monsieur. The envelope is addressed “To you from your 2 boarders,” and on the front are several rows of red hearts and flowers, along with the first half of the sentiment “A Valentine Gift for You ’Cause You’re my Valentine!” Signing the card as if from Monsieur in helter-skelter printing, Grace wrote, “and mine, too, Wag, wag, wag!” PPA.
48. GFAB, early 1957.
49. See, e.g., GFAB, 1957, 1959, 1965, and 1969.
Chapter 23
1. Marguerite Yourcenar to Malvina Hoffman, January 15, 1957, in Yourcenar, Une Volonté sans fléchissement, 47.
2. Lalonde, Un Jardin entouré de murailles, 101.
3. Ibid., 101–2.
4. GFAB, March 21, 1957.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Commentaire pour Grace,” MYC (76).
6. Ibid.
7. Ben Ray Redman, “A Look in the Mirror,” Saturday Review, July 20, 1957, 22.
8. Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” review of Coup de Grâce, New York Times, July 23, 1957.
9. Herbert Kupferberg, review of Coup de Grâce, New York Herald Tribune, July 31, 1957.
10. Carlos Baker, “A Baltic Soldier,” New York Times, July 21, 1957.
11. William Hogan, review of Coup de Grâce, San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 1957.
12. Edwin Kennebeck, “Strange Triangle,” Commonweal 66 (1957): 574–75.
13. [Virgilia Peterson,] “The Memoirs of a ‘Soldier of Fortune,’” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, July 21, 1957, 3; and Maurice Dolbier, “Meeting Writers on Ship and on Shore,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, July 21, 1957, 3.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar to Gilbert H. Montague, September 3, 1957, MYP (991). A copy of Peterson’s autobiography, A Matter of Life and Death, still resides at Petite Plaisance.
15. Edith Hamilton to Marguerite Yourcenar, August 30, 1961, MYP (342).
16. [Peterson,] “‘Soldier of Fortune,’” 3.
17. Louise Dudley to “Grace and Marguerite,” April 14, 1957, MYC (2456).
18. Katherine Gatch to Marguerite Yourcenar, June 13, 1957, MYC (2695).
19. GFC.
20. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, August 12, 1957, NCBC 2387.
21. Mme. Marcel Vertès to Grace Frick, December 9, 1957, MYC (5514).
22. GFAB, December 30, 1957.
23. GFAB, January 4, 1958.
Chapter 24
1. GFAB, January 7–16, 1958.
2. GFAB, February 16, 1958.
3. GFAB, February 18, 1956.
4. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, February 8, 1950, MFA.
5. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, January 14, 1979, Fay family archives.
6. GFAB, February 26, 1958.
7. GFAB, March 11, 1958.
8. GFAB, April 19, 1958.
9. GFAB, May 9–29, 1958; Grace Frick to Chenoweth Hall and Miriam Colwell, March 11, 1964, Colwell family archives.
10. GFAB, May 29, 1958.
11. GFAB, June 1, 1958.
12. GFAB, May 25, 1958.
13. GFAB, undated page at the rear of the 1958 daybook.
14. GFAB, April 12–15, 1958.
15. Marguerite Yourcenar to Henri Balmelle, April 2, 1959, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 138.
16. GFAB, July 14, 1958.
17. GFAB, July 14 and July 22, 1958. As usual, Monsieur’s birthday party featured a raw-hamburger cake decked out with candles.
18. Marguerite Yourcenar, personal communication, 1982, quoted in Anne Olga Dzamba, “Adelaide Pearson of Blue Hill, Maine,” typescript conveyed to the author by Sharon Thompson.
19. GFAB, August 15, 1958.
20. GFAB, August 28, 1958.
21. Leopold, A Darker Ribbon, 153.
22. Marguerite Yourcenar to Élie Grekoff, October 24, 1958, in Yourcenar, Une Volonté sans fléchissement, 280. Curiously, there is no mention of Grace’s cancer in any of the published or archival correspondence with Natalie Barney until 1964.
23. Marguerite Yourcenar to Élie Grekoff, October 24, 1958, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 279.
24. For this whole trip, see GFAB, October 20–24, 1958.
25. GFAB, “Grace Frick Diary (Part 2),” August 16, 1959.
26. Yourcenar, An Obscure Man, in Two Lives and a Dream, 18; see also Deprez, Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA, 55–56.
27. GFAB, “Grace Frick Diary (Part 2),” March 26, 1959.
28. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, November 10, 1959, MFA.
29. Marguerite Yourcenar to Élie Grekoff, July 29, 1959, in Yourcenar, Une Volonté sans fléchissement, 367.
30. GFAB, April 29, 1959.
31. The exhibit had taken place in September. Miriam Colwell, e-mail to the author, July 23, 2008.
32. Chenoweth Hall, postcard to “G. & M.,” n.d., PPA.
33. Miriam Colwell, interview with the author, July 14, 2008.
Chapter 25
1. GFAB, January 10–13, 1960.
2. GFAB, March 29–31, 1960.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, June 5, 1960, in Yourcenar, Une Volonté sans fléchissement, 462–63.
4. GFAB, November 4, 1960.
5. Grace Frick to Natalie Barney, November 10, 1962, MYC (5435).
6. GFAB, September 3, 1960.
7. GFAB, September 8, 1960.
8. The daybooks dated 1948–59 contain, e.g., nearly twice as many words on average as those for 1960–72.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jacques Kayaloff, December 31, 1960, in Yourcenar, Une Volonté sans fléchissement, 521–22.
10. See, e.g., Ruth Hill to Grace Frick, September 7, 1958, MYP (1206).
11. GFAB, February 15–16, 1961.
12. See Werth, The Scarlet Professor; “Arvin, Newton,” Smithipedia (Smith College), http://sophia.smith.edu/blog/smithipedia/faculty-staff/arvin-newton; “Newton Arvin Papers, 1900–2001,” Five College Archives and Manuscripts Collections, http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/smitharchives/manosca36.html, accessed on February 11, 2017; and Robert D. McFadden, “Joel Dorius, 87, Victim in Celebrated Anti-Gay Case, Dies,” New York Times, February 20, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/obituaries/20dorius.html?_r=0.
13. “The Literary Lights of Artists’ Colony Cast Long Shadows to Smith College,” NewsSmith (Smith College), summer 2009, http://www.smith.edu/newssmith/summer2009/yaddo.php.
14. McFadden, “Joel Dorius,” states that “Mr. Arvin . . . named names, including those of Mr. Dorius and Edward Spoffard.”
15. Smith College, “Former Smith Professor Joel Dorius Dies,” February 20, 2006, http://www.smith.edu/news/2005-06/doriusobit.html.
16. Elizabeth von Klemperer, obituary of Charles Hill, Smith Alumnae Quarterly, summer 2000, 89; GFAB, February 17, 1961.
17. Charles Hill to Grace Frick, February 18, 1961, MYC (2857).
18. See Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Lambert, January 23, 1961, in Yourcenar, Persévérer dans l’être, 38–39.
19. Smith College Office of College Relations, “Actions of the Smith College Board of Trustees regarding Issues of Civil Liberties Past and Present,” March 22, 2002, http://www.smith.edu/newsoffice/releases/01-085.html.
20. GFAB, June 10, 1961; Florence MacDonald (secretary of the board of trustees of Smith College) to Marguerite Yourcenar, May 27, 1961, MYC (5203).
21. Vickery, Smith College: An Architectural Tour, 128–29.
22. GFAB, April 2–7, 1961; David Cuthbert, “My O My: A Legend Evoked,” New Orleans Times Picayune, April 29, 2005.
23. Yourcenar, Blues et gospels, 8.
24. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xxvii.
25. Shirley McGarr, interview with the author, November 24, 2009.
26. Lynn Ahlblad, interview with the author, September 6, 2006.
27. GFAB, November 30, 1961.
28. Yourcenar, Sources II, 273.
29. Marguerite Yourcenar to Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, Christmas 1962, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 170.
30. Ibid., 171. The Marquis de Custine wrote the 1839 work Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia.
Chapter 26
1. Yourcenar’s “Critical Introduction to Cavafy,” the preface to the Cavafy translations, appears in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, translated by Richard Howard.
2. Yourcenar, “Sur quelques thèmes érotiques et mystiques de la Gita-Govinda,” preface to Shri Jayadeva, Gita Govinda.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar, “The Legend of Krishna,” Encounter 13, no. 6 (1959): 3–9.
4. Yourcenar, Rendre à César, later published in Théâtre I and, as Render unto Caesar, in Plays.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, November 10, 1962, MYC (4204).
6. Rodriguez, Wild Heart, 339; Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, June 20, 1958, MYC (1032).
7. Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar, telegram to Malvina Hoffman, October 23, 1962, Malvina Hoffman Papers, Getty Research Institute, Series I.A., Correspondence 1909–68, box 11. Hoffman studied sculpture in France under Auguste Rodin.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar to Malvina Hoffman, October 23, 1962, Malvina Hoffman Papers, Getty Research Institute, Series I.A., Correspondence 1909–68, box 11. By “the two of you” Yourcenar means Hoffman and her companion Gullborg Groneng, known as Guldie. Hoffman’s obituary in the New York Times states that “Miss Hoffman had been living at the studio with her secretary.” “Malvina Hoffman Dead at 81,” New York Times, July 11, 1966.
9. GFAB, February 18, 1963.
10. Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Women Alone Stir My Imagination,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 4 (1979): 734.
11. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, December 27, 1960, MYC (1032).
12. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, July 20, 1961.
13. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, August 28, 1961, MYC (4204).
14. Shusha Guppy, “The Art of Fiction No. 103: Marguerite Yourcenar,” Paris Review 30, no. 106 (1988): 8.
15. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, December 25, 1961, MYC (1032).
16. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, January 13, 1963, MYC (1032).
17. Miron Grindea, ed., “The Amazon of Letters: A World Tribute to Natalie Barney,” special issue of ADAM International Review 30, no. 299 (1962).
18. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 29, 1963, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 186–87. Flanner, author of the New Yorker’s “Letter from Paris” for fifty years, explained her choice not to take part in the ADAM International tribute as follows: “Miss Barney is a perfect example of an enchanting person not to write about”—whatever that means. Janet Flanner, quoted in Wickes, The Amazon of Letters, 211.
19. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 29, 1963, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 187–88. Balzac’s Girl with the Golden Eyes dealt, scandalously at the time, with issues of seduction and bisexuality.
20. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, July 29, 1963, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 189.
21. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, November 14, 1963, MYC (1032).
22. Natalie Barney to Grace Frick, November 16, 1963, MYC (5401).
23. Grace Frick, foreword to the 1963 Island Red Book, 1–7. Today the annual volume is called The Redbook: Directory and Handbook; Northeast Harbor resident Cheryl Chase is the editor and publisher.
24. Teddy, card to Monsieur, August 20, 1963, MYP (1371).
25. Marguerite Yourcenar (as Monsieur) to Teddy, August 21, 1963, MYP (1371).
26. Grace Frick to Natalie Barney, November 27, 1963, NCBC 2395.
27. For these committees see, e.g., GFAB, March 26 and 30, 1963, and January 18 and April 2, 1965.
28. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, November 29, 1963, NCBC 2396. Yourcenar and Frick never owned a television, but on occasions such as this they would go next door to watch with the McGarr family.
29. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, December 6, 1963, MFA.
30. Ibid.
31. Merton, Seeds of Destruction, 7. Yourcenar, Sources II, 330.
32. Yourcenar, Fleuve profond, 8.
33. Deprez, Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA, 106.
34. Grace Frick to Jean-Louis Côté, February 18, 1964, MYC (4423). The words in brackets here were mostly cut off and hard to read.
35. Grace Frick to Katharine Peryam, December n.d., 1971, FFA.
36. Frick reports the date of this new operation variously as December 2 or 3, depending on the source.
37. GFAB, December 24, 1963.
38. GFAB, December 25, 1963.
39. GFAB, January 14, 1964.
Chapter 27
1. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, January 21, 1964, MFA.
2. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, March 30, 1964, NCBC 2398.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Traversée sur le Bathory,” unpublished typescript, MYC (524).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Carnets de notes de L’Œuvre au Noir,” in Œuvres romanesques, 857.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Mirror-Games and Will-o’-the-Wisps,” in That Mighty Sculptor, Time, 95.
10. Yourcenar, “Carnets de notes de L’Œuvre au Noir,” 860. Yourcenar and Frick spent many evenings with Pasquale and Curtis over a period of thirty years. Only once does the daybook mention an evening of music, on October 5, 1959.
11. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, October 5, 1964, NCBC 2399.
12. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney (draft), October 5, 1964, MYC (4204). She left out the last nine words in the second version of the letter.
13. Frick was particularly fond of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “We Shall Overcome” from Pete Seeger’s album Little Boxes: Broadside Ballads 2. Grace Frick to Paul and Gladys Minear, December 29, 1964, MFA.
14. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 236. Participants also sent a strongly worded antiwar letter to President Richard Nixon.
15. Bar Harbor Times, December 18, 1964, 1.
16. Grace Frick to Larry Minear, n.d. (probably 1964), MFA.
17. See Larry Minear, “About the Author,” http://larryminear.com/about-the-author-2.
18. Bar Harbor Times, February 4, 1965, 1, and February 11, 1965, 1.
19. GFAB, February 7, 1965.
20. GFAB, February 11, 1965.
21. GFAB, February 13, 1965.
22. The microfilm copy of Yourcenar’s letter preserved at Bar Harbor’s Jesup Memorial Library contains several illegible words in the first few paragraphs. Square brackets contain the easier ones to figure out or identify. The essays “Fur-Bearing Animals” and “Who Knows Whether the Spirit of Animals Goes Downward” can be found in Yourcenar, That Mighty Sculptor, Time.
23. Bar Harbor Times, February 11, 1965, 1.
24. GFAB, February 7, 1965.
25. GFAB, December 5, 1965.
Chapter 28
1. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, March 1, 1960, MYP (42).
2. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar, December 27, 1960, MYC (1032).
3. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, August 17, 1965, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 224.
4. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges Roditi, August 17, 1965, MYC (4204).
5. GFAB, May 23, 1965, mentions Olin being there “for two nights end of May or first week in June.” Olin remembers them first meeting in 1966. He may be right, as Frick’s daybook entry is less precise than usual.
6. John Olin, interview with the author, August 7, 2009. Frick and Yourcenar were making an exception in picking up Olin. The couple had sometimes stopped for hitchhikers back in Connecticut, but one day Grace had a close call that caused her to abandon the practice. Driving alone on an isolated road in a wooded area of the state, she picked up a stranger in a snowstorm. She narrowly escaped being raped. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 17, 1983.
7. Olin interview.
8. GFAB, April 20 and 22, 1966.
9. Grace Frick to Kathie Frick, November 10, 1966, FFA.
10. GFAB, November 23–27, 1966.
11. Grace Frick to Gage Frick, February 16, 1967, FFA.
12. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, December 19, 1966, MYC (1032). Although this letter was written almost entirely in English, Barney used the expression “en procès” here, and her choice of terms is reflected in Yourcenar’s response. I have provided a translation in brackets that can serve in both locations.
13. Marguerite Yourcenar to Natalie Barney, January 1, 1967, MYC (4204).
14. GFAB, March 15, 1967.
15. GFAB, March 25, 1967.
16. GFAB, October 14, 1967.
17. Yourcenar, Sources II, 323.
18. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, March 10, 1970, courtesy of Fay’s daughter, Hope Cobb.
19. GFAB, May 13–18, 1968.
20. Flanner, Paris Journal, 2:249.
21. Rodriguez, Wild Heart, 354.
22. Chalon, Portrait of a Seductress, 220.
23. Ibid., 221.
24. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Chalon, April 9, 1976, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 497.
25. GFAB, May 24, 1968.
26. GFAB, May 19 and 26, 1968.
27. GFAB, May 29, 1968.
28. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean and Roger Hazelton, June 3, 1968, Hazelton family archives.
29. See Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 304–5, for the critical reaction to this book.
30. GFAB, June 1, 1968.
31. Ibid., June 6, 1968.
32. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Mouton, April 7, 1968, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 285.
33. Yourcenar, The Abyss, 139.
Chapter 29
1. GFAB, June 14–18, 1968.
2. GFAB, October 30, 1968.
3. Information about the progress of Frick’s illness comes from a cancer report, written on both sides of five index cards and stapled together, that Frick sent to Gladys Minear on February 26, 1977, MFA.
4. Last will and testament of Grace Frick, executed on November 5, 1968, in Bar Harbor, Maine, MYC (566).
5. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, December 17, 1967, Fay family archives.
6. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, March 16, 1968.
7. Grace Frick to Hortense Flexner, February 14, 1968, MYC (5440).
8. Erika Vollger to Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar, November 29, 1968, MYP (780).
9. Rose Chessin, telegram to Grace Frick at Morgan and Company, Paris, sent on December 7 but received on the December 9, 1968, MYP (157).
10. Four-page sequence of events prepared by Frick using letters from Chessin, MYP (157).
11. Wilson journal entry, February 26, 1980, Wilson family archives.
12. Author’s personal journal entry, July 13, 1984.
13. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 306.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar to Camille Letot, [November] 28, 1968, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 304. Lettres à ses amis gives a date of October 28 for this letter, but the Femina prize was not announced until November 25. Grace Frick was deeply moved by this visit with three generations of the Letot family. She would write a lovely letter to Camille on December 10, 1969, recalling the intimacy of their gathering in Gosselies and how pleased she was to have been part of it (see Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 336n2). To Yourcenar’s earlier letter she added, “I am very happy to have met all of you, too, and to have friends in Belgium. I promise you, Madame Camille, that I will do my best to take good care of our dear Marguerite.”
15. “M’as-tu vu?” or “Did you see me?”; Grace Frick to Helen Howe, January 4, 1969, Schlesinger Library, Helen Howe Repository, Container I.C. 227, Correspondence with Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, 77-M218-78.
16. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 313–14.
17. Jean Chalon, e-mail to the author, March 7, 2010.
18. Grace Frick to Paul and Gladys Minear, February [15–16,] 1969, MFA.
19. GFAB, January 6 and 20 and November 3, 1969; Frick cancer report sent to Gladys Minear, February 26, 1977, MFA.
20. GFAB, February 3, 1969.
21. Pamela York, telephone interview with the author, March 29, 2013.
22. GFAB, March 8, 1969.
23. GFAB, March 10, 1969.
Chapter 30
1. GFAB, November 4, 1969.
2. GFAB, May 2, 1971.
3. GFAB, August 20–23, 1967.
4. GFAB, August 26, 1967.
5. GFAB, August 18, 1968. Clements’s article from this interview was never published.
6. Marguerite Yourcenar to Gerald Kamber, October 30, 1968, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 305–6.
7. Yourcenar, Présentation critique d’Hortense Flexner.
8. GFAB, November 21–23, 1969.
9. Author’s personal journal entry, July 17, 1982.
10. Marguerite Yourcenar, “André Gide Revisited,” in Cahiers André Gide, vol. 3, Le Centenaire, 22. An annotated offprint is available at MYC (19).
11. For all the Rosbo correspondence, beginning April 10, 1969, see MYC (3609).
12. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marthe Lamy, June 30, 1973, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 395.
13. GFAB, September 2, 1970.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marc Brossollet, February 26, 1973, MYP (864).
15. Rosbo, Entretiens radiophoniques avec Marguerite Yourcenar.
16. Patrick de Rosbo, “Huit Jours de purgatoire,” Gulliver, February 4, 1973, 30–35.
17. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marthe Lamy, June 30, 1973, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 396.
18. Josane Duranteau, “Avarice de soi,” Les Lettres françaises, September 27, 1972.
19. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marc Brossollet, March 13, 1973, MYP (864).
20. As she notes in the novel’s postface, some of the characters’ names come from genealogies of her ancestors; Yourcenar, The Abyss, 370. They include Wiwine, Hilzonde, Zénon, and Adriansen. Yourcenar, Réception de Marguerite Yourcenar à l’Académie royale, 12.
21. GFAB, March 21, 1971.
22. Anita Fahrni, e-mail to the author, April 17, 2013; GFAB, March 26–27, 1971.
23. Sarton, I Knew a Phoenix, 42.
24. GFAB, April 18, 1971.
25. GFAB, April 4–5, 1971.
26. GFAB, April 6 and 25 and May 2, 1971.
27. GFAB, April 18 and 25, 1971.
28. GFAB, April 12, 1971.
29. According to the 1971 daybook, Frick and Yourcenar arrived in Paris on May 18 and left there on June 12, 1971. GFAB, 1971.
30. Rodriguez, Wild Heart, 361.
31. Natalie Barney to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, November 17, 1970, MYC (1032).
32. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Chalon, February 7, 1972, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 388.
33. GFAB, June 13, 1971.
34. Grace Frick to Kathie Peryam, sometime in the summer or fall of 1971, FFA.
35. GFAB, August 1, 1965.
36. Ann Gilkes, interview with the author, August 28, 2010.
37. Frick expected Ann and Amelia on September 12 according to the daybook, but their visit was postponed. It probably occurred on Sunday, September 19. Hardly anything is noted in the daybook for September 13–30. GFAB, September 12–30, 1971.
38. Ann Gilkes, interview with the author, August 28, 2010.
Chapter 31
1. Marguerite Yourcenar, quoted in John R. Wiggins, “Famous French Author Lives in Northeast Harbor,” Ellsworth (ME) American, April 11, 1974.
2. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Des chiens que j’aimais,” a text that Yourcenar wrote on the back pages of her paternal aunt Gabrielle de Crayencour’s schoolgirl notebook, MYC (842).
3. Ibid.
4. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Tribute to Valentine,” in Sources II, 311.
5. Ibid., 313.
6. “Une Vie, une œuvre, une voix” [A life, a vocation, a voice] aired on Antenne 2 on February 19 and 20, 1972.
7. Handbill for Électre ou la Chute des masques, MYC (128).
8. GFAB, August 24–29, 1974.
9. Ibid., September 7–14 and 27–29, 1974.
10. Yourcenar called Brissac’s letter “scatterbrained” in a letter to Jean Chalon, February 3, 1977, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 527.
11. Morand, “Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat, par Marg Yourcenar,” Le Courrier littéraire 15 (1930): 158.
12. Marguerite Yourcenar to Elvire de Brissac, July 1, 1972, MYC (862).
13. Brissac, Ballade américaine, 180.
14. Brissac, Ballade américaine, 180–82. “Parigote” is a colloquial, often pejorative term for a Parisian girl or woman.
15. Brissac, Ballade américaine, 182–83.
16. Marguerite Yourcenar to Marc Brossollet, December 10, 1976, MYP (864).
17. Marguerite Yourcenar to André Bay, December 29, 1976, MYC (5235).
18. André Bay to Marguerite Yourcenar, January 4, 1977, ibid.
19. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, February 19, 1977, MYP (868).
20. Jean Chalon, “Sur les traces de Lolita,” Le Figaro, January 8, 1977.
21. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean Chalon, February 3, 1977, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 527–28.
22. Jean Chalon, journal entry of February 8, 1977, provided to the author via e-mail on March 7, 2010. The passage was published in Chalon’s Journal de Paris.
23. Brissac, Ballade américaine, 190–91.
24. Grace Frick to Kathie Peryam, n.d., FFA.
25. Grace Frick, postcard to Richard Minear, n.d., MFA.
26. Yourcenar, Sources II, 290–91.
27. GFAB, April 12–15 and November 10, 21, and 30, 1972.
28. GFAB, December 31, 1972.
29. GFAB, February 14, 1973.
30. Grace Frick to Helen Howe, February 20, 1973, Helen Howe repository.
31. Grace Frick to Gage Frick, November 30, 1972, FFA.
32. Grace Frick to Kathie Peryam, April 17, 1973, FFA.
33. GFAB, October 15–17, 1971.
34. GFAB, January 7, 1973.
35. GFAB, July 24–August 1, 1973.
36. “Phyllis Bartlett, Educator, Is Dead,” New York Times, April 19, 1973.
37. GFAB, March 16 and 21, 1973.
38. “Baron de Cartier, Belgian Envoy, 74, Ambassador to London, Dean of Corps, Is Dead,” New York Times, May 11, 1946, 27; Marguerite Yourcenar, Souvenirs pieux, documents and notes, MYC (459).
39. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, July 21, 1973, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 402.
40. Grace Frick to Gage Frick, July 22, 1973, FFA.
41. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, August 3, 1973, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 405.
42. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, August 31, 1973, MYP (868).
Chapter 32
1. GFAB, January 14–25, 1974.
2. See, e.g., GFAB, August 12, 1974.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, August 14, 1974, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 442–43.
4. GFAB, September 24, 1974; Frick cancer report sent to Gladys Minear, February 26, 1977, MFA.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, July 25, 1975, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 468.
6. See, e.g., GFAB, October 6–12, 1974.
7. Yourcenar, Sources II, 302–4.
8. GFAB, January 3, 1974.
9. Yourcenar, Sources II, 281–82.
10. Nicolas Calas to Marguerite Yourcenar, September 23, 1975, MYP (127).
11. Marguerite Yourcenar to Nicolas Calas, September 26, 1975, ibid. (866).
12. Yourcenar, Sources II, 303.
13. GFAB, June 1–2, 1975.
14. GFAB, July 25–26, 1975.
15. Gunnar Hansen, interview with the author, July 18, 2006.
16. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, n.d. [but most plausibly summer 1975], courtesy of Hope Cobb (Fay’s daughter).
17. Esther Hahn to Jean Hazelton, December 2, 1994, MFA.
18. Ibid.
19. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, July 25, 1975, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 467–68.
20. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, January 18, 1976, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 486.
21. Marguerite Yourcenar to André Bay, September 21, 1975, MYC (5235).
22. Grace Frick to the Minear family, February 13, 1977, MFA. The essay Frick refers to here is Marguerite Yourcenar, “Fur-Bearing Animals,” in That Mighty Sculptor, Time, 87–88.
23. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, July 20–28, 1976, MYP (868).
24. Arthur A. Cohen, review of The Abyss, New York Times Book Review, July 11, 1976, 7–8.
25. Frank Kermode, “A Successful Alchemist,” New York Review of Books, October 14, 1976, 6, 8.
26. Review of The Abyss, Times Literary Supplement, October 22, 1976, 1321.
27. “Cartesian Quest,” Times Literary Supplement, October 3, 1968, 1103.
28. Mary Renault, “Imagining the Past,” Times Literary Supplement, August 23, 1974, 893.
29. Review of The Abyss, Times Literary Supplement, October 22, 1976, 1321.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, July 20–28, 1976, MYP (868).
31. Lewis Gannett, quoted on the back of the book jacket of The Abyss.
32. Peter S. Prescott, review of The Abyss, Newsweek, June 28, 1976, 75.
33. Naomi Bliven, “Truth and Consequences,” New Yorker, June 14, 1976, 109–10.
34. Review of The Abyss, Choice 13 (1976): 835.
35. Robert Taylor, “New Historical Fiction—Finest in Years,” Boston Globe, June 29, 1976.
36. Stephen Koch, “In a Circle of Flames,” Saturday Review, June 12, 1976, 29, 30.
37. Yourcenar, Sources II, 247.
Chapter 33
Epigraph: Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat,” in Complete Works, 135.
1. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, July 20–28, 1976, MYP (868).
2. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, April 16, 1976, MYP (868).
3. Yourcenar, Sources II, 304.
4. Ibid., 303.
5. GFAB, January 1, 1977.
6. Review of Volker Schlöndorff’s Coup de Grâce, Soho Weekly News, February 16, 1978, contained in a folder of clippings in English about the film, MYC (883).
7. Frick cancer report sent to Gladys Minear, February 26, 1977, MFA.
8. On January 19, 1977, according to Grace Frick’s February 1977 cancer report.
9. Frick cancer report, 1977; Grace Frick to Paul, Gladys, and Anita Minear, February 13, 1977, MFA; GFAB, 1977.
10. Marguerite Yourcenar, Valentine’s Day card to Grace Frick, February 14, 1977, MYP (913).
11. Frick cancer report, 1977. The report ends here. “End of long story,” she writes on the last index card.
12. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, February 19, 1977, MYP (868).
13. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, February 26, 1977, MFA.
14. Marguerite Yourcenar, interview by Françoise Faucher, in Maurice Delcroix, comp., Portrait d’une voix, 148–49.
15. Grace Frick to Gladys Minear, February 13, 1977, MFA.
16. GFAB, April 8, 1977.
17. GFAB, April 13, 1977.
18. GFAB, April 19 and 21, 1977. Yourcenar, for her part, notes on pages 304 and 323 of Sources II that Frick was hospitalized April 3–10 and 12–17, 1977, in Bar Harbor and then April 21–27, 1977, in Bangor.
19. GFAB, May 23, 1977.
20. Grace Frick, postcard to Marguerite Yourcenar, February 3, 1947, PPA.
21. WCCC, 1950, WCA.
22. Grace Frick, postcard to an unnamed addressee, February 4, 1947, PPA.
23. Grace Frick, postcard to Marguerite Yourcenar, February 4, 1947, PPA.
24. Grace Frick, postcards to Marguerite Yourcenar, February 5, 1947, PPA.
25. Grace Frick, postcard to “The Emmas” [Emma Trebbe and Emma Evans], February 5, 1947, PPA.
26. GFAB, February 15, 1947.
27. GFAB, May 23, 1977.
28. Grace Frick, letter and postcard to Kathie Peryam, June 17, 1977, FFA.
29. Grace Frick, letter and postcard to Kathie Peryam, May 26, 1977, FFA.
30. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Chronologie,” in Œuvres romanesques, xxx.
31. Grace Frick, letter and postcard to Kathie Peryam, June 17, 1977, FFA.
32. Traveling by train to meet Frick in Taos, New Mexico, during the first days of writing Hadrian, Yourcenar described herself, similarly, as “closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb”; Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian, 328.
33. Marguerite Yourcenar, “L’Italienne à Alger,” in Le Tour de la Prison, 29–30.
34. See, e.g., Sarde, Vous, Marguerite Yourcenar, 199, and Deprez, Marguerite Yourcenar and the USA, 125.
35. On page 91 of her copy of Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, Yourcenar marked the paragraph in which Don Juan says, “The twilight is the crack between the worlds.”
36. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, July 6, 1977, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 552. For Zeno’s end, see Yourcenar, The Abyss, 354–55.
37. I have dated “L’Italienne à Alger” on the basis of temporal references in the text itself.
Chapter 34
1. Élie Grekoff and Pierre de Monteret, telegram to Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, June 1977, MYP (332).
2. GFAB, October 30, 1977.
3. GFAB, January 23, 1978.
4. Thérèse de St. Phalle to Marguerite Yourcenar, December 24, 1977, MYP (671).
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Louis Pelissier, December 17, 1977, MYP (1013).
6. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jean d’Ormesson, October 24, 1977, MYC (5008).
7. GFAB, June 21, 1977.
8. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, November 12, 1977, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 577–78.
9. GFAB, July 16–19, 1977.
10. GFAB, August 12–15, 1977.
11. Grace Frick, Christmas card to Paul and Gladys Minear, December 16, 1977, MFA.
12. Frick lists the publication projects in which she participated in the 1978 daybook. See also Sous bénéfice d’inventaire: Corrections, MYC (441 and 442); and Selma Lagerlöf: Préface, MYC (422).
13. GFAB, April 30 and May 1, 1978. Dumay’s show was broadcast in France on June 4, 1978.
14. GFAB, November 1, 1978, a date next to which Yourcenar subsequently placed four large X’s in Flair pen.
15. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 6, 1983. On August 26, 1985, she called Jerry Grénier’s secretary.
16. See, e.g., Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 2, 362–63; and Goslar, “Qu’il eût été fade,” 299.
17. Deirdre Wilson (no relation to Jerry), conversation with the author, May 8, 2009.
18. See Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 376–77; and Yourcenar, Japan and India travel diary, 1977–83, MYC (196). In the latter notebook, Yourcenar mistakenly assigns to 1977 Wilson’s professional trips to Northeast Harbor of May and November 1978, and to 1978 his personal visit to Grace of 1979.
19. See chapter 29.
20. Jean-Marie Grénier, “Les Derniers Voyages de Marguerite Yourcenar,” in Goslar, ed., Dix Ans après . . . , 106.
21. GFAB, May 15, 1978.
22. GFAB, May 15–24, 1978.
23. GFAB, June 20, 1978.
24. GFAB, June 21–24, 1978.
25. GFAB, July 7–8, 1978.
26. GFAB, July 10–12, 1978.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar, “Carnets de notes de L’Œuvre au Noir,” in Œuvres romanesques, 858.
28. John Olin, interview with the author, August 7, 2009. Olin was not sure when the incident occurred, most likely 1977 or 1978.
29. Olin interview.
30. Grénier, “Derniers Voyages,” 104–5.
31. Villon, Poems, copy in PPA.
32. Yourcenar saved this poem, which I have slightly abridged, with her papers, MYP (1349).
33. GFAB, November 24, 1978.
34. Grace Frick to Minear, n.d. [but pre-Thanksgiving 1978], MFA.
35. Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 192–93.
Chapter 35
1. National Cancer Institute, “Photodynamic Therapy for Cancer,” https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/types/surgery/photodynamic-fact-sheet.
2. American Cancer Society, “Photodynamic Therapy,” http://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatmentsandsideeffects/treatmenttypes/photodynamic-therapy.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 4, 1983.
4. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, January 14, 1979, MS Fr 423 (6), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
5. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, July 4, 1983.
6. Kaighn and Ann Smith, interview with the author, September 27, 2008.
7. Gay Smith was married outdoors on the windy western shore of Somes Sound on December 23, 1978. This event was not for the faint of heart! Frick and Yourcenar attended both the ceremony, on the Jesuit Plain, and the small gathering at the Smiths’ home afterward.
8. Smith interview.
9. Ruth Westphal, interview with the author, September 20, 2007.
10. Deirdre Wilson, interviews with the author, October 24, 2009, and September 23, 2007.
11. Grace Frick to Gertrude Fay, February 13, 1979, Fay family archives.
12. Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 367.
13. Marguerite Yourcenar to Jeanne Carayon, May 15, 1979, MYP (868). See also letters to Jean-Paul Kauffmann, MYP (940).
14. Jean-Paul Kauffmann file, MYP (396).
15. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, October 16, 2005.
16. Deirdre Wilson, telephone interview with the author, November 9, 2009.
17. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, December 3, 2009.
18. Wilson interview, October 16, 2005.
19. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, February 4, 2010.
20. Ibid. Beth Kelley (now Renault) was about fifteen years old at the time, so this incident probably occurred in 1968.
21. Wilson interview, October 16, 2005.
22. Ibid.
23. Chancel, Marguerite Yourcenar: Radioscopie, 24–26.
24. Yourcenar, Fires, 116.
25. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, May 15, 1979, MYP (868).
26. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, May 28, 1979, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 602–3.
27. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, May 28, 1979, MYC (4432).
28. Yourcenar, Sources II, 276.
29. Ibid.
30. See Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, September 17, 1979, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 612.
31. Yourcenar, Sources II, 276.
32. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, September 17, 1979, in Yourcenar, Lettres à ses amis, 276.
33. Yourcenar, Sources II, 276–77.
34. Author’s conversations over the years with Jean Lunt, Shirley McGarr, Deirdre Wilson, and others.
35. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, November 20, 2009.
36. Wilson interview, October 16, 2005.
37. Shirley McGarr, interview with the author, September 4, 2005.
38. Marguerite Yourcenar, conversation with the author, August 27, 1985.
39. Marguerite Yourcenar to Georges de Crayencour, October 15, 1979, MYC (4432).
40. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, January 15, 2009. Wilson also said that Frick did not need oxygen to breathe until a week before her death (Savigneau, Inventing a Life, 372). But she did use oxygen for going to doctors and climbing stairs.
41. Readers familiar with the Yourcenar biographies will note that my depiction of Grace Frick’s death differs from the standard account, most prominently with regard to the music box that Yourcenar played at Frick’s bedside. In 1980 Yourcenar spoke to Matthieu Galey of “the modest little Swiss music box that plays pianissimo an arietta of Haydn, which I started playing at Grace’s bedside one hour before her death, when she ceased to respond to word or touch”; Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, 261–62. That music box still resides on a bookshelf in Frick’s bedroom. The Merry Pranks music box, by contrast, has disappeared. But Deirdre Wilson, the only person who was present with Yourcenar that evening until Frick died, remembers the experience as if it were yesterday.
42. Indeed, Till’s Flemish roots went back to the era of religious Reformation and wars that played such a significant role in the life of Yourcenar’s beloved Zeno. Though often identified with his playful antics, Till was also a fighter, like Frick, for the rights of common people.
43. Deirdre Wilson, interviews with the author, September 17, 2007, April 27, 2009, and January 21, 2010.
44. Westphal interview, September 20, 2007.
45. Wilson interview, September 23, 2007.
46. Biographical material on Grace Frick, MYP (1376).
47. Obituary of Grace Frick, Bar Harbor Times, November 22, 1979.
48. Ruth Westphal, interview with the author, September 24, 2007.
Epilogue
1. Deirdre Wilson, interview with the author, January 26, 2007.
2. Grace Frick funeral service, MYC (565), translated by Marguerite Yourcenar.
3. Marguerite Yourcenar, handwritten note in green Flair pen, found at Petite Plaisance. On June 25, 1985, she would reiterate her desire for a funeral service identical in every respect to Frick’s. Her handwritten note identifies the readings listed above as “having served from [sic] Grace Frick’s funeral at Union church, Northeast Harbor in Nov. 1979” and requests that they “serve unchanged and without any omissions or additions for the funeral service of Marguerite Yourcenar either in same church or in any other place.” Yourcenar, handwritten note, Grace Frick funeral service, MYC (565).
4. In the end the stones were made of granite overlaid with slate. Yourcenar preferred slate because it was “more natural than the bronze, in a setting that we wish to make as natural as possible.” Marguerite Yourcenar to Brooke Roberts, January 22, 1980, MYC (564).
5. Marguerite Yourcenar to Gertrude Fay, November 25, 1979, MS Fr 423 (6), Houghton Library, Harvard University.
6. “Hospes Comesque” also serves as the capstone to Yourcenar’s beautiful homage “to G.F.” in “Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian,” which became an integral part of the novel after 1951. See chapter 15.
7. Koelb, Legendary Figures: Ancient History in Modern Novels, 121.
8. Yourcenar, entry dated July 25, 1973, in Sources II, 274.
9. Marguerite Yourcenar to Brookside Cemetery Society, December 26, 1979, MYC (564).
10. Author’s personal journal entry, July 23, 1983. “This is lovely,” I added.
11. Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte to Marguerite Yourcenar, October 4, 1980, MYC (564). Yourcenar spoke of Nel’s proximity to her first meeting with Grace in a letter dated October 5, 1945: “Grace is the friend I went to see in America in 1939, and I have lived with her since that time. You may remember that it was after having heard about your thwarted journey to America, aboard the Normandie, and our plan to travel to Persia (which events would thwart as well) that Grace decided to speak to me in the little bar of the Wagram. So your silhouette is in a sense magically mingled with the beginning of my present life.” Yourcenar, En 1939, 118.
12. Katherine Gatch to Marguerite Yourcenar, March 7, 1980, MYP (309).