Marguerite Yourcenar, in the second volume of Le labyrinthe du monde, a family history begun with Souvenir pieux, reaffirms her position as one of the outstanding writers of her generation. Souvenirs pieux concerned the maternal side of her family. In Archives du nord, she turns to the paternal branch.

In an introductory chapter Yourcenar traces the geographical and historical development of Flanders, the stage on which her human drama is set. She has a great historian's gift for conveying the sense of "the immensity of time" and an artist's gift for expressing, in a prose that never falters, man's amazement and despair as he confronts it. She discovers the first traces of her paternal family…. Their vicissitudes reflect the agitated history of Flanders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century, when documents become more numerous, the human actors in the drama move to center stage...