The Abyss

Marguerite Yourcenar's novel of sixteenth century Europe is, like Memoirs of Hadrian, essentially a meditation on the nature and condition of man. But unlike the Hadrian it is direct narrative, and is somber, even bitter in tone, portraying the struggle of a free mind in highly troubled times. The principal character, Zeno, typical of the leading intellectuals of his day in the wide range of his studies and activities, is botanist and physician, alchemist, engineer, metallurgist, and philosopher. In advance of the recognized science of his era, forced perpetually to thread his way between compromise and revolt, he is akin to his great historical contemporaries and near-contemporaries, the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, the Spaniard Servetus, preoccupied like Zeno with studies of circulation of the blood, the Leonardo of the Notebooks, with their experiments and secret meditations, and that audacious but unlucky philosopher, Tommaso Campanella.