The Blind Eye Within: Jacqueline de Romilly on Seeing and Aging

Jacqueline de Romilly (1913–2010), one of the preeminent figures of classical philology in France during the 20th century, is best known for her books on 5th-century Athenian political and cultural history. She may also be remembered as the second woman (after Marguerite Yourcenar) to have been elected to the Académie française (1988) as one of its "Immortals." Less familiar to her readers are the biographical works she wrote late in life, among them Les roses de la solitude (2006), Les révélations de la mémoire (2009), and Jeanne (2011). These provide a window on her joys and on her regrets at having lived her life as a classicist.

In Les roses de la solitude in particular, de Romilly, nearly blind and confined in the study and sitting room of the Paris apartment where she lived most of her adult life, gazes into her past, arrested by the sight of objects which have long figured in her daily life. Her heightened sense of mortality and near blindness focus the recollection of her past, personal and professional, around those objects and prompt reflections on a life both nourished and diminished by an uncompromising commitment to the classics.