Last excerpt from Mémoires d'Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar:

"Little soul, tender and inconstant soul, companion of my body, of which you were a guest, you will go down to those places pale, hard and naked, where you must renounce the games of yore. For a moment, let us contemplate together the familiar places, the objects that we will surely never see again... Let us strive to enter death with open eyes..." (p. 251)

There are several excerpts from the author in her notebook on this book which I - as a reader, would like to publish here, but I realize that it is better to leave these beautiful passages of our dearest Yourcenar to the delight of you, if interested, future readers of this great literary work.

As a token of curiosity, I will leave here in this note a critique of the author on the erudism of culture, written in a footnote, pages 287-288:

"The same observation applies naturally to many works mentioned here. It can never be too much to say that a rare, sold out book, found only on the shelves of some libraries, or an article appearing in an early issue of a scholarly publication, is totally inaccessible to the vast majority of readers. In 99% of the cases, the reader, desirous of being educated, but with lack of time and some familiar techniques only to the professional scholar, remains, whether or not, tributary of works of vulgarization chosen a little by chance, and the best of which, almost never reprinted, they are often difficult to find. What we call our culture is, more than we think, a culture behind closed doors."