With Trajan's conquest of Mesopotamia just before his accession to the throne, the Empire had reached its peak indeed, it was now clearly over-extended and threatened with collapse. The illusion that Hadrian is speaking to you directly is extraordinarily compelling. The world-view is, throughout, that of the second century A.D. (This effect must be hard to imitate in translation to a non-Romance language). The language is a beautiful and highly stylised French that feels very much like Latin the cadences are those of Latin, and every word she uses is originally derived from Latin or Greek. The final result, the memoirs Hadrian might have composed on his deathbed but never did, represents the distilled essence of this process, and it is unique in my experience. She compiled tens of thousands of pages of notes and rough drafts, nearly all of which she burned. She was acutely aware of all the pitfalls involved, and used her considerable skills to efface herself from the process "she did not want to breathe on the mirror". Every night, she tried to imagine that she was Hadrian, and spent hours writing minutely detailed accounts of what he might have seen and felt. She visited the places he had visited, and touched the statues he had touched. She read every book still in existence that mentioned him or that he might have read. Finally, in her early 40s, she arrived at a method she could believe in, which she describes as "half history, half magic": she spent several years systematically transforming herself into a vessel for the long-dead Emperor's spirit. Over the next decade and a half, she returned to the idea several times, and each time admitted defeat. She spent five years on the task, then destroyed the manuscript and all her notes. At the age of twenty, Marguerite Yourcenar conceived the idea of writing the life of the Emperor Hadrian. This book is the fruit of one of the most ambitious literary projects I have ever seen.
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