Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death. ... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

In 1951 Marguerite Yourcenar publiMarguerite Yourcenard in France the novel Mémoires d'Hadrien which Marguerite Yourcenar had been writing with pauses for a decade. This novel has become a modern classic a standard against which fictional recreations of antiquity are measured. "One of the respected writers in French language Marguerite Yourcenar publiMarguerite Yourcenard many novels essays and poems as well as three volumes of memoirs.

Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist.