O! when mine eyes did see Olivia first . . .
—William Shakespeare
“DID YOU FIRST MEET HER in Hartford?” Donald Harris queried as he chauffeured Grace Frick around Mount Desert Island on a raw November morning in 1977.
“Oh, heavens no!” Grace replied. “We met in Paris.”
So begins the only known extant recording of Grace Frick’s voice and the only firsthand account of Frick and Yourcenar’s meeting whose source is not Marguerite Yourcenar. The composer Donald Harris had come to Northeast Harbor with his then wife, Nadine Bicher, on Thanksgiving weekend in 1977 to discuss his plan to write an operetta based on Yourcenar’s play The Little Mermaid.1 That same weekend a French television crew had traveled to Maine from Washington, DC, intending to film Yourcenar in some of her favorite island locations. Harris offered to drive Frick from place to place on that cold and windy Sunday, trailing the vehicle in which Yourcenar was riding with the television crew. She was filmed on Sargeant Drive, the road that winds along the beautiful arm of the sea known as Somes Sound; near Somes Brook, where Marguerite and Grace once loved to swim on a hot summer’s day; and in the Brookside Cemetery, where the two women would one day be buried. Frick spoke of the past as they drove from Northeast Harbor to Somesville, stopping near the log cabin she and Yourcenar had rented during their first summers on Mount Desert Island.
Frick had gone to Paris in early 1937 at the behest of her Uncle George and Aunt Dolly LaRue. For the family that raised her, she had long been the person to turn to in a crisis. This time her twenty-five-year-old cousin Nancy Gallagher had contracted tuberculosis. An orphan taken in by the LaRues when she was six, Nancy had grown up in Kansas City with Grace, seeing her as a kind of older sister. The two girls had even shared a bedroom for a time. After graduating from Notre Dame de Sion High School in 1931, Nancy took the veil at the mother convent of that Catholic order in Paris. Henceforth, she would be Sister Marie Yann.
Grace had already been to France twice, and she was the only family member who could negotiate her way in French, though she did not feel particularly proficient in the language at the time.2 She most likely left New York on January 27, 1937, on the SS Deutschland, which called at Cherbourg on February 4, dropping off two passengers.3 By that afternoon she had reached Paris and taken a room at the Hôtel Wagram. Overlooking the Tuileries Garden from 208 rue de Rivoli, the Wagram was where Oscar Wilde and his bride, Constance, had honeymooned in June of 1884, occupying a small suite on the third floor.4 Perhaps it was in part for its literary pedigree that Marguerite Yourcenar always stayed at the Wagram when she was in Paris during the 1930s. Grace had stayed there previously, too, when she, Uncle George, and Aunt Dolly had gone to visit Sister Yann in August of 1934. But this would be a very different trip. Grace Frick was now traveling solo, and Marguerite Yourcenar was in residence at the hotel. The lives of both women were about to be forever changed.
Grace had this to say about her first night at the Wagram forty years after the fact:
Marguerite Yourcenar lived there in winters, and I saw her in this kind of a daze, you know. I sail very well, but I’m land-sick. I’m reeling in the dining room traffic. The dining room wasn’t very full, and I noticed this young woman—she was quite a young woman—in a corner table with guests, obviously a man and wife. [. . .] She was wearing a Russian dress in which she was photographed later for a large painting. And . . . and her eyes were so striking . . . immense gray-blue eyes. And I said, I’ll seek her out.5
The next morning Grace went immediately to the convent at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where her cousin was nearing death.6 “Nancy died just three days after I got there,” Grace continues, adding,
I stayed on to settle the various problems of the estate. That hotel had a little bar, and when I learned it was cheaper, I went there, because everybody else did. Marguerite was having drinks with a French friend, and I . . . That was a small place, and I sort of heard the word “America.” I recognized it. When he left, she went up to the bar and ordered dinner. So I went up and said, “Do you speak English, Madame?” And she said, “Yes, I do.”
Grace then pauses briefly before adding, to peals of laughter from her listeners, “And she now says to me, ‘What if I’d said, “No, I don’t”?!’”7
When Josyane Savigneau was writing her biography in the late 1980s, there were only two primary versions of the meeting between Grace and Marguerite, the one that Yourcenar told her young traveling companion Jerry Wilson after Grace’s death and the one that Frick related to a friend back in 1937. In Wilson’s account, Savigneau writes, Grace was alone in the bar of the Wagram:
At the table next to hers, Marguerite Yourcenar was conversing with Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte. In Yourcenar’s version, they were talking in a general way about traveling, and also about their respective travel plans. It was reportedly then that Frick intervened asking Yourcenar, in order to start up a conversation, if she would like to make a trip to the United States. “The next morning,” Jerry Wilson goes on to say in his journal, “the young ‘chasseur’ [page boy] came to Mme. Y’s room saying that the American lady sent a message that some lovely birds could be seen on a roof through her window, wouldn’t she come up to see. She did and they became friends,” concludes Jerry Wilson euphemistically.8
Florence Codman, Grace Frick’s former classmate at Wellesley College, told the other version of the story to Savigneau in March of 1989. It contains an interesting twist. Grace had phoned Florence in New York City immediately after returning from Europe in the late summer of 1937. Soon she would be heading back to Yale University to work on a PhD dissertation on the poet George Meredith. According to Codman, Grace “was immediately dazzled by Marguerite; it was a real case of love at first sight.” As for the meeting itself, Codman recalled that “Grace was in fact alone in the bar and Marguerite was engaged in conversation with a man. They were talking about literature, about Coleridge in particular. ‘They were saying things that were so inaccurate, indeed so stupid, that I intervened to tell them they had it all wrong,’ Grace told me.” Savigneau, for her part, “given everything we know about Frick and the peremptory way in which she would intervene without being solicited,” finds Codman’s version of events to be “certainly the more plausible.”9 While no one who knew Frick would likely minimize her teacherly propensities, what Grace said in 1977 about her new French acquaintance stands in stark contrast to what Codman remembered: “We got to talking that first dinner. Marguerite asked if I was working on the early poetry of George Meredith. Well, it turned out she knew more about English literature than I did!”10
In the mid-1980s Marguerite Yourcenar also told me about meeting Grace. Here is what I wrote in my journal on July 14, 1983:
G.F. was staying at the same small but luxurious hotel, rue de Rivoli (Hôtel Wagram—which was pillaged during the war and no longer exists except for the words on the sidewalk), where M.Y. kept two rooms. The hotel had both a restaurant and a bar, where M.Y. would eat because it was less expensive. . . . M.Y. was in the bar one night with a journalist friend (male), and they were talking about traveling. M.Y. told him she’d like to perhaps go to America (for a short time) but was really interested in going to Persia. The man left and G.F., who had heard their conversation from her table, asked M.Y. if she wanted to go to America. M.Y. joined her and they had a drink (wine) or a sandwich together and talked.
During the conversation M.Y. said something about liking birds. Next day—Mme Yourcenar smiles and is animated telling this story—she gets, through the intermediary of the hotel staff, a pretty little card from G.F. saying to come to her room and see the birds on the roof. M.Y. invited her to a nightclub, where they didn’t enjoy themselves, and then invited her to Sicily and Greece.11 They spent three months traveling thus, and then G.F. returned to the U.S.A.
There is no way to be sure exactly what happened or was said in the bar of the Hôtel Wagram that February day. But Yourcenar’s 1983 account clearly echoes that of Frick in several respects, including the chronology of the episode, the mention of a possible trip to America as an initial point of contact, and the meal that the two young women shared. The conclusion of Frick’s 1977 reminiscence, while omitting the tale of the birds on the roof, continues to resonate with Yourcenar’s version of the story, and adds to it a detail that she may have been the only living soul to recall:
After we met in Paris, Marguerite was going south. She’d never been in Sicily, and I had never, at that time, never been in Italy. So we . . . Since I was there and my cousin was gone, why, I stayed, and we set off to Sicily together. [. . .] We were to take a boat at Genoa, and . . . She suffered terribly from dizziness, and there was a gangplank—the boat was like this, you know. They had to blindfold her to get her up there. “I can’t take it,” she said. So she left.
Reenvisioning this abortive attempt to board ship, Grace can’t conceal her amusement. Whereupon she exclaims with a mischievous giggle, “So that was the beginning of our travels together!”12