The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar

First published:L’Œuvre au noir, 1968 (English translation, 1976)

Type of work: Period realism

Time of work: 1510-1569

Locale: Reformation Europe

Principal Characters:

• Alberico de’ Numi, a Florentine nobleman
• Zeno, his bastard son, an alchemist, physician, and philosopher
• Henry Justus Ligre, Zeno’s uncle, a powerful merchant
• Henry Maximilian Ligre, his son, Zeno’s cousin, a soldier of fortune
• Hilzonda Ligre, Zeno’s mother, the sister of Henry Justus
• Jean-Louis de Berlaimont, the prior of a monastery in Bruges and Zeno’s protector
• Bartholomew Campanus, the brother-in-law of Henry Justus, canon and then bishop, Zeno’s mentor at first and later his judge
• Simon Adriansen, an Anabaptist merchant, Hilzonda’s husband after Alberico’s death
• Jan Myers, a barber-surgeon, Zeno’s mentor in Bruges and later his host
• Philibert Ligre, the son of Henry Justus and later head of the Bank of Ligre

The Novel

The Abyss is the story of one man’s devotion to truth. As Zeno relentlessly searches for knowledge, vast historical forces—Catholicism and Protestantism, France and the Holy Roman Empire, agrarianism and commercialism—turn Reformation Europe into a bloodbath. Marguerite Yourcenar’s careful documentation adds to this continent-sized clash between dissidence and dogma a great sense of period realism.

The story opens in 1530. Henry Maximilian Ligre runs into Zeno outside Dranoutre, Henry Justus Ligre’s Belgian country estate, and the two discuss plans. At sixteen, Henry Maximilian is planning to serve with King Francis I. At twenty, Zeno is leaving to study alchemy in Spain. Both have abandoned the merchant House of Ligre. Henry Maximilian has chosen war, poetry, and women. Zeno has chosen a rendezvous with himself.

A flashback recalls Zeno’s youth. His father, Alberico, was a friend of Michelangelo and prelate to Cesare Borgia. While staying with Henry Justus,his business agent in Bruges, he is smitten with Hilzonda. He later abandons her when she becomes pregnant with Zeno.

Alberico, a Roman cardinal by age thirty, is killed in an orgy. Simon Adriansen then courts Hilzonda. Zeno learns the classics from Canon Campanus and medicine from Jan Myers, and designs the mechanical looms used in the Ligre workshops. At the School of Theology in Louvain, Zeno comes to disdain dogma. His summer vacations are spent at Dranoutre, where his best moments are passed in alchemical speculations on the changing color of the leaves and the combustion of charcoal. He pities the numerous religious sects he sees forming and wishes to renounce his clerical vows.

One evening at Dranoutre, Henry Justus mounts a royal reception for Marguerite of Austria, who is there to ask for a loan. Henry Justus’ weavers interrupt the festivities to request a raise and a pardon for their foreman, who has destroyed the looms. Henry Justus grants the loan, but no raise or pardon. Zeno, equally disgusted by the cynicism of the high life and the technophobia of the low life, departs in search of another critical mind. He will remain underground for the next twenty years.

Simon and Hilzonda are married and move to Munster, where they help found an Anabaptist City of God. A joint Catholic and Protestant army lays the city to siege. Inside, a mountebank proclaims himself God, executes the underzealous, and takes seventeen wives. The troops overrun the city and resume executions. Simon returns from a fund-raising expedition to find his wife beheaded. On his deathbed, he writes Salome, his sister. She will rear Simon’s surviving daughter, Martha.

Salome is married to Martin Fugger of Cologne, whose money makes him more powerful than any prince of Europe. The elder Ligre has sent his son, Philibert, to learn banking under Martin. Martin betroths Philibert to his blood daughter, Benedicta. Benedicta, however, is stricken by the plague. Zeno, traveling incognito, visits and treats her. She dies, but Martin merely substitutes Martha’s name on the wedding contract.

During the Council of Trent (1551-1552), Henry Maximilian again encounters Zeno at an inn in Innsbruck. Maximilian is employed by Marshall Piero Strozzi to spy on the Pope’s messenger, Nuncio della Casa. Coincidentally, Zeno is Nuncio’s physician and alchemist. The two cousins compare life histories. Zeno has performed dissections in Montpellier, invented liquid fire in Algeria, published a philosophical treatise, had an Arab male servant as his lover, and fought the plague of 1549. Henry Maximilian has served both France and Spain as a mercenary for twenty-five years. He sees Europe not only as a puppet show, with financiers pulling the strings, but also as a beauty pageant, with many a fair nymph for whom to compose verses. Henry Maximilian will die from a stray bullet at the Battle of Sienna in 1555.

Zeno escapes from Innsbruck a hair’s breadth from the Inquisition. He is then successively an alchemist in Wurzburg, a surgeon in Poland, and an astronomer in Uppsala. In Paris, the Queen Mother refuses her protection, and Zeno’s Protheories are seized. He renounces his life as a fugitive and returns to Bruges under the guise of Dr. Sebastian Theus.

Jan Myers provides lodging for him. Zeno treats Jan’s patients and discusses current events with Prior Jean-Louis de Berlaimont. Twice, the crude maidservant Catherine warms his bed. Catherine poisons Jan Myers, supposedly for Zeno. Outraged, Zeno inherits Myers’ house but donates it to the monastery’s hospice and retains only the duties of pharmacist.

Zeno can neither speak nor write freely. This deprivation triggers “the abyss,” a deep descent within himself in search of pure concepts. Cleansed by this “black work” of mental alchemy (l’oeuvre au noir), Zeno returns to everyday realities to find the prior terminally ill with an inoperable throat polyp. The atrocities of the Duke of Alba, a Spanish terrorist named Governor of the Low Countries in 1567, weigh heavily on the prior’s conscience.

Zeno’s innocent knowledge of a sex cult, “The Angels,” imperils his life. The monastery’s accountant, Pierre de Hamaere, and two monks, Cyprian and Florian, meet at night to “worship” the noble damsel Idelette de Loos. Zeno fears the consequences of a pregnancy. When the prior’s death deprives him of a protector, he departs immediately. His plan is to cross the channel in a clandestine boat, but he is overcome by a feeling of “insupportable weariness” and returns to the hospice.

Idelette strangles her newborn child. Cyprian is arrested and falsely implicates Zeno. The physician is in turn brought to trial. The judge is Bartholomew Campanus, now a bishop. Pierre Le Cocq, the duke’s representative, prosecutes. The indictment bears on every facet of Zeno’s life. Zeno’s co-accused are swiftly dispatched: Florian burns screaming, Idelette’s head is hacked off; Pierre de Hamaere poisons himself. Catherine’s ravings of intercourse with Zeno are particularly damaging.

Pierre Le Cocq is deeply indebted to the Ligre Bank, and the bishop writes to Philibert, asking him to sway the prosecutor toward clemency. With Martha’s silent approval, Philibert does nothing.

Zeno is convicted of atheism and impiety. The bishop calls on Zeno to offer him a reprieve in return for a public retraction. Zeno refuses, having “lost his aptitude for lying.” Choosing suicide over torture, he opens his veins. Zeno the wanderer finally keeps his appointment with himself.

The Characters

The Abyss has a cast of more than four hundred characters. There are men of money (the Ligres and the Fuggers), men of the cloth (Canon Campanus and Berlaimont), men of war (Marshalls Strozzi and Montluc), men of science (Zeno and Francois Rondelet), and “the lesser estate” (jailers, blacksmiths, and the like). Feminine characters consist primarily of self-interested royalty (Catherine of Medicis and Marguerite of Austria) and mystic martyrs (Hilzonda, Vivine, Benedicta, Idelette, and Martha). An exception is the Lady of Froso, a healer who was able to match Zeno’s mind. Special sympathy goes to the aged: the prior, Jan Myers, and Bishop Campanus. The sheer numbers give an idea of the scale of Yourcenar’s drama. Her characterization reveals what she values: intelligence, goodness, simplicity, and justice. Conversely, she detests brutality, violence, self-satisfaction, and connivance.

In an author’s note, Marguerite Yourcenar reveals her numerous sources. Zeno resembles Erasmus (bastardy), Giordano Bruno (imprisonment), Tycho Brahe (astronomy), Paracelsus (alchemy), Tommaso Campanella (persecution), Etienne Dolet (violence), Leonardo da Vinci (inventions), and the latter four in his alleged sodomy. Michel de Montaigne inspired the prior, and the Fuggers were the true financiers of Charles V. Through his dissidence, Zeno also calls to mind Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Margaret Sanger. Alberico suggests both the Venetian painter Titian and Yourcenar’s own father Michel Cleenewerke de Crayencour. Albrecht Durer’s engraving Melancholia inspired the first part of the novel, and the scenes of horror and disorder were influenced by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Zeno dominates all other characters. Through his universal appetite for knowledge, he embodies the ideal of the Renaissance man. Successively theologian, alchemist, engineer, physician, astronomer, botanist, and philosopher, he is at the forefront of all these fields. His insistence on truth and his contempt for stupidity make him fearsome to others. In a hospitable world, there would have been no upper limit to his potential.

Critical Context

In the context of Yourcenar’s personal canon, The Abyss points backward to her Memoires d’Hadrien (1951; Memoirs of Hadrian, 1954) and forward to Le Labyrinthe du monde, an autobiographical project interrupted by the author’s death. The first two works, monumental in scope and architecture, are credited with restoring the historical novel in France. The third is predicted by Zeno’s phantasy vision in prison of a melancholy son by the Lady of Froso. “If that phantom was his child, then he, philosopher though he was, was caught up in the game...; he would not get out of this labyrinth until the end of time.”

In the general current of French literary history, Yourcenar’s treatment of difficult moral issues suggests comparison with Andre Gide. Her painful revisions recall the arduous polishing of Gustave Flaubert. Her classical erudition places her in the humanist tradition, but her focus on daily life more closely aligns her with the New Historians. Her taste for formula evokes the maxims of the seventeenth century moralists. Yourcenar’s greatest stylistic achievements are her narrative voice, a kind of intimate third person, and her irony, a form of resigned disgust. In 1968, her forty years of work on The Abyss were recognized by the esteemed Prix Femina, and in 1980, she became the first woman elected to the French Academy.

Bibliography

Farrell, C. Frederick, Jr., and Edith R. Farrell. Marguerite Yourcenar in Counterpoint. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983. A short collection of essays devoted mostly to Yourcenar’s lesser-known early fiction. It attempts to counter some commonly held critical assumptions about Yourcenar’s work, such as her avoidance of woman protagonists and women’s issues. It assumes prior acquaintance with Yourcenar.

Horn, Pierre. Marguerite Yourcenar. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A short chronological overview of all Yourcenar’s work, with a brief biographical introduction. Focuses on her major fiction, but also discusses her autobiographical writings and her forays into theater and translation.

Howard, Joan E. From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Howard looks for coherence amid Yourcenar’s wide-ranging intellectual and thematic interests, and she finds it in the writer’s use of classical myth in various contexts and of the theme of sacrifice within the mythic framework.

Savigneau, Josyane. Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life. Translated by Joan E. Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Yourcenar was a private, even reclusive person who remained determinedly aloof from literary circles. She even had her private papers sealed until 2037. Nevertheless, Savigneau’s biography is thoroughly researched, and it won critical praise for its combination of accuracy, verve, and tact.

Shurr, Georgia Hooks. Marguerite Yourcenar: A Reader’s Guide. Landham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. A guide to Yourcenar’s fiction, with emphasis on the evolution of her creative imagination and her temperament as sources of her style.

Yourcenar, Marguerite. With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. A series of interviews spanning a number of years. The talks range from Yourcenar’s childhood to her late interest in ecology, her works, and her opinions on social issues such as racism and feminism.