Lecture Rencontre

Description

The group meets to discuss a book on the last Friday of the month (with some exceptions) at the Médiathèque de l'Atelier.
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. On his deathbed, the Roman emperor Hadrian (117-138) addresses a letter to the young Marcus Aurelius, in which he begins by giving "audience to his memories". The wandering of the mind soon took on a structure, following a chronology and a rigorous way of thinking that was characteristic of the great figure. Behind the cultivated aesthete and fine strategist that was Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar tackles the themes that are dear to her: death, the puzzling duality of body and mind, the sacred, love, art and time. In the image of the latter, that "great sculptor", she voluptuously carves, shapes and refines each of the great man's inner traits, prompting him to say: "I'm counting on this examination of the facts to define me, to judge me perhaps, or at least to get to know me better before I die. Marguerite Yourcenar once found an unforgettable phrase in Flaubert's Correspondance: "The gods being no more, and Christ not yet being, there has been, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment when man alone has been." And the author of Hadrian's Memoirs adds: "A large part of my life was to be spent trying to define, and then to paint, this man alone and, moreover, connected to everything." Translated into sixteen languages and acclaimed by the world's press, Hadrian's Memoirs has never ceased, since its publication in 1951, to attract new readers to this second-century emperor, this "almost wise man" who was, as well as an initiator of the new times, one of the last free spirits of Antiquity.

Date

Friday 27 February 2026 between 4 pm and 6 pm.

Tarifs

Free of charge.