YOURCENAR Marguerite (1903-1987) [AF 1980, 3e f] ; elle fut - Lot 251

Lot n° 251
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YOURCENAR Marguerite (1903-1987) [AF 1980, 3e f] ; elle fut - Lot 251
YOURCENAR Marguerite (1903-1987) [AF 1980, 3e f] ; elle fut la première académicienne. L.A.S. " Marg. Yourcenar ", Brussels 14 December 1930, to Jean ROYÈRE; 3 pages small in-4 on mauve paper, envelope. Beautiful letter about fame and the novel. She thanks her friend for his beautiful letter and answers him on the question of glory: "It is a fruit that one does not eat, you say, but that one shares. You are a thousand times right. Fame should be considered [...] only as a means. [Unfortunately, in everyday life, glory hardly presents itself to us except in the form of success, which is pleasant from a practical point of view, but disappointing and often dangerous. I do not yet know exactly what I am worth. The important thing for me, at the moment, is to arrive, in the precise sense of the word, to estimate myself. What I wrote to you the other day about the novel is not very accurate. A novel is not the equivalent of a poem; it is something else; I think it is even more. In the poem, the sensation returns to us, multiplied, but identical to what it was at the beginning. The advantage of the novel, even autobiographical, is that it detaches us from ourselves, and forces us to adopt, as much as possible, the point of view of the creator. She is touched by the care that Royère and his wife give to their daughter-in-law, "a masterpiece of devotion"... She adds an amusing postscript on the final formulas of the letters, and concludes: "The English say that "the rose can be called as it wants, it would be always the rose". But it is a proverb to which it is ambitious to allude when one is called only Marguerite". L'Académie française au fil des lettres, p. 280-283.
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