Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987)

Rome, which I was first to venture to call ‘eternal’, would come to be more and more like the mother deities of the cults of Asia, bearer of youths and of harvests, sheltering at her breast both the lions and the hives of bees.
But anything made by man which aspires to eternity must adapt itself to the changing rhythm of nature’s great bodies, to accord with celestial time. Our Rome is no longer the village of the days of Evander, big with a future which has already partly passed by; the plundering Rome of the time of the Republic has performed its role; the mad capital of the first Caesars inclines now to greater sobriety; other Romes will come, whose forms I see but dimly, but whom I shall have helped to mould. When I was visiting ancient cities, sacred but wholly dead, I promised myself to save this Rome of mine from the petrification of a Thebes, a Babylon, or a Tyre. She would no longer be bound by her body of stone, but would compose for herself from the words State, citizenry, and republic a surer immortality.

I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution of engendering a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests on two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation. I have put my virtues to use as well as I could, and have profited from my vices likewise, but I have no special concern to bequeath myself to anyone. It is not by blood, anyhow, that man’s true continuity is established.

An object brought from Italy was hanging on the wall of the small antechamber, a Florentine mirror in a tortoise-shell frame, formed from a combination of some twenty little convex mirrors hexagonal in shape, like the cells of a beehive, and each mirror enclosed, in its turn, by a narrow border which had once been the shell of a living creature. Zeno looked at himself there in the gray light of a Parisian dawn. What he saw was twenty figures compressed and reduced by the laws of optics, twenty images of a man in a fur bonnet, of haggard and sallow complexion, with gleaming eyes which were themselves mirrors. This man in flight, enclosed within a world of his own, separated from others like himself who were also in flight in worlds parallel to his, recalled to him the hypothesis of the Greek Democritus, about an infinite series of identical universes in each of which lives and dies imprisoned a series of philosophers.

The fantasy evoked a bitter smile. The twenty little figures of the mirror smiled, too, each alone in his frame. He then saw them turn their heads half away and direct themselves toward the door.

The small citadel of the Just, encircled by the Catholic troops, lived in a very fever of God. The spur to their courage was the open-air preaching held each evening. Bockhold, the favourite Saint, pleased them all with his sermons, for he knew how to season the gory images drawn from the Apocalypse with jokes from the actor's trade. Mingled with the shrill voices of the women, imploring air from their Father in Heaven, rose the groans of the sick and of those first wounded in the siege, who lay on these warm summer nights under the arcades of the square. Hilzonda was one of the most ardent among the worshippers: standing tall, elongated like a flame, the mother of Zeno would denounce the ignominies of Rome. Her eyes, filled with frightful visions, would cloud with tears; suddenly collapsing like a too slender taper and sinking to the ground, she would week in tender contrition, and in the desire to die.