Marguerite Yourcenar et Proust : l'écriture rayonnant de la mort

“When a statue is finished, that day, its life begins in a certain sense”. This sentence from Yourcenar’s Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur echoes Proust’s Bal de têtes in the last tome of the Recherche: from this point of view, I investigate M. Yourcenar’s works considering the origin of her writing. Based on memory that operates as a vast geological funnel, whence their characters are shaped as stone statues, the writing of the two novelists wavers between the importance of fragment and the idea of a complete architecture of the past. First I scan Yourcenar’s letters; afterwards, I outline the analysis of her novels in order to find the mark of Proust’s Recherche in her idea of memory, her characters and her writing.