The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  A line of robust critical counter-reading of Le Grand Meaulnes insists, first, that Fournier’s epiphany in Paris was constructed, as most such literary epiphanies so often are, retrospectively, in light of the book he later wrote and had in mind to write. (Real though she was, Beatrice doubtless shone brighter to Dante once he started writing his poem and needed her image more.) More important, the movement of the book can be understood, without too much strain, as really counter-romantic; Meaulnes, after all, impregnates his fairy, leaves her to die in childbirth and is left not with the persistence of his adolescent fantasies but with the physical consequence of his animal and adult nature: his daughter, not his dream. (The vengeful fantasy of seeing a woman who has, in real life, rejected you die while bearing your child is one that Hemingway indulged in, too, a few years later, in A Farewell to Arms, an adolescent novel pretending to be a war book.) It is possible to draw a cold, sardonic moral from Le Grand Meaulnes just as, once again; it is possible to draw an anti-idealist and anti-romantic moral from The Great Gatsby. Gatsby, after all, is not an avatar of the American dreamer, but a victim of the American dream – a decent man brought down by the false pursuit of an unworthy object and a sordid and debased and meretricious set of values; all those shirts are not a worthy object of a grown man’s desire.

  Yet to say this is to deny the manifest spell both novels cast. It is left to ordinary books, of which there are many, to teach realistic lessons and point out morals; good books cast spells and cast out demons. If Le Grand Meaulnes offers a kind of day-dream, it has lasted for a very long day. Part of the power of the novel is that Fournier was among the first to see that this form of erotic attachment – which in one way is not erotic attachment at all, but merely adolescent fantasy – can be as powerful as any other. Fournier’s fantasy persists into our own day as a pattern in books as stirring (and unlike) as A Separate Peace and The Secret History. Alain-Fournier was the first to give form to one of the most powerful of twentieth-century myths, which continues to illuminate life.

  A flare more than a fire… with one of those dreadful symmetries that are too much for fiction, this novel of a lost, enchanted world was published just as the lights were about to go out all over Europe, and real flares would take their place. Yet perhaps it was the tragedy that awaited poor Meaulnes, and poor Fournier (as it awaited Wells and the boys in the Peter Pan house, for that matter), that helped give this day-dream its resonance. Poor Meaulnes? Poor Fournier? Lucky Meaulnes, lucky Fournier, perhaps, for all that they foresaw, and for all that they were not forced to see. There are worse things in the world to be prisoners of than childhood.

  Adam Gopnik

  NOTES

  1. Havelock Ellis, Introduction to The Wanderer (New York: New Directions, 1928).

  2. Frank Davison, Translator’s Introduction, Le Grand Meaulnes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

  A Note on the Translation

  Translabtors of Alain-Fournier’s novel have come across several difficulties, starting with the title. ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ is both the title of the book and the name given to its central character, the schoolboy whose fellows are impressed by his presence and his height: grand can mean ‘tall’ as well as ‘great’. Some, like the translator of the previous version in Penguin Classics, decided to skirt round the problem by keeping the French title, with an alternative, ‘The Lost Domain’, as a subtitle. Another translator tried ‘The Wanderer’ and, as a subtitle, ‘The End of Youth’. There are, in fact, more titles of this book in English than there are translations of it.

  My own solution is to take a phrase from the novel, ‘le domaine perdu’, to translate it literally as ‘the lost estate’ and to use that as the title, taking advantage of the fact that in English the word ‘estate’ can be used to mean both a property in the country and a period of life (‘man’s estate’, ‘youth’s estate’): this is a book about the passing of adolescence – and nostalgia for it – in which the central character comes across an isolated country house and estate, has a strange adventure and is later unable to find his way back there. But I do not imagine that everyone will approve of my choice of title. This is a work that has passionate admirers who will defend it against any meddling.

  The novelist John Fowles was one such admirer. In his Afterword to Lowell Blair’s translation he described Alain-Fournier’s novel as a ‘poignant and unique masterpiece of alchemized memory’.1 He also remarked that, in his opinion, the book was ‘very nearly untranslatable’: ‘Just as certain great French wines like Montrachet and Sancerre… have defeated all attempts by foreign vineyards to imitate them, so do Fournier’s style, tonality, and charm refuse transposition into another language.’ He was not, he said, suggesting that Lowell Blair had made a bad job of it, ‘but simply underlining the insoluble problems that face the brave man who tried the task’.2

  Fowles is not the only person to suggest that Alain-Fournier’s book is, in many respects, untranslatable. Frank Davison, the translator of the previous Penguin Classics version, has two lengthy footnotes early in the book explaining his difficulties with two crucial problems of translation: the first is the title of the book; the second is the designation of the isolated house and grounds that Meaulnes discovers, for which Fournier uses the French word domaine.3 As Davison points out, both terms, grand and domaine, here carry overtones and shades of meaning that are not conveyed by any single word in English. As a result, he decided, first, to retain the French expression ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ both as the title of the book and as the name of its central character; and secondly, to use the English word domain, while describing it as ‘a literal, if not exact, translation’.

  There are, clearly, difficulties in translating any literary work, but I think that both Fowles and Davison have tended to exaggerate the problems in this case. As I said, Le Grand Meaulnes is a novel that has attracted a cult following. For those who read it in French, the language of the book, the atmosphere of the book, the very words of the book acquire a peculiar resonance, an indefinable poetry that seems to exclude any form of re-expression. ‘Le domaine mystérieux’, Tetrange domaine’ and, most of all, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ are beyond translation: read Davison’s first note, in which he finds not only ‘tall’ and ‘great’ in this particular grand, but also ‘the big, the protective, the almost grown-up… in schoolboy parlance, good old Meaulnes’ and, ‘in retrospect’, the image of someone ‘daring, noble, tragic, fabulous4… No wonder he throws up his hands in despair and decides not to translate the phrase at all, using the French word throughout his version.

  Yet, as Davison himself admits, some of the meanings evoked by the words grand and domaine only attach to the phrase ‘in retrospect’, after one has read the Alain-Fournier’s book. Similarly, for some readers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the mere phrase ‘The Great Gatsby’ may have a powerful connotative charge. So if these everyday words, grand and domaine, have acquired such a charge in the context of this book, to the extent that they appear untranslatable, this must be because they are part of a whole in which the narrative and the language it uses combine to move the reader in a particular way. The words that designate the hero and the place where he had his adventure acquire their poetic charge from the context of the novel, not the other way around.

  For that reason, I have decided to translate these expressions into plain English: Meaulnes is ‘The Great Meaulnes’, the domaine is the ‘estate’. I assume that my English readers will be able to get over the tendency to call the central character The Great Moan, and that they will realize that a country estate in the Sologne is not the same as one in Hampshire or Shropshire. In short, though, I have decided simply to ignore these two cruxes that seemed such a problem to Davison and to hope that the rest of my translation will, at least to some extent, convey what Fowles calls Fournier’s ‘very simple, poetic manner’.5

  In fact, Fowles goes on to mention certain negative characteristics of Fournier’s style: his simplicity which is at times naivety, his repetit
ions… He might have added Fournier’s fondness for suspension points, as well as for sentences and even paragraphs beginning with ‘and’. There is also the typical Fournier sentence, with its subordinate clauses separated by commas, giving a nervous feel to the writing:

  Meaulnes, hiding behind the firs, so that no one could see him, was looking at this clutter when he noticed, on the other side of the yard, just above the seat in a tall charabanc, a half-open window in one of the outbuildings (p. 48)

  – one result of which is to give a sense of anxiety, unease, disturbance – words that recur over and again to describe the feelings of the characters and particularly of The Great Meaulnes himself.

  Every translation represents a series of compromises; no translation can convey the whole of the original. The most I can hope is that, for some readers at least, I shall have suggested a little of the charm of Alain-Fournier’s ‘untranslatable’ novel.

  Robin Buss

  NOTES

  1. Alain-Fournier, The Wanderer, or The End of Youth (Le Grand Meaulnes), translated by Lowell Blair with an Afterword by John Fowles, Signet Classic, New American Library, 1971, p. 223.

  2. Ibid., pp. 221–2.

  3. Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes, translated by Frank Davison, Penguin Books, 1966, pp. 18 and 47. This translation was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1959.

  4. Davison, Le Grand Meaulnes, p. 18.

  5. Fowles, Afterword to The Wanderer, p. 221.

  To my sister, Isabelle

  PART ONE

  I

  THE BOARDER

  He came to our place one Sunday in November 189–.

  I still say ‘our place’, even though the house no longer belongs to us. It will soon be fifteen years since we left the neighbourhood, and we shall certainly never go back.

  We lived on the premises of Sainte-Agathe upper school. My father (like the other pupils, I called him ‘Monsieur Seure’) was in charge of both the upper school, where they studied for the teaching certificate, and the middle school. My mother took the junior class.1

  A long red house, with five glazed doors shrouded in Virginia creeper, at the far end of the little town; a huge courtyard with shelters and washing places which opened at the front towards the village through a large gateway; on the north side, the road beyond a little barred gate leading to the railway station, three kilometres away; to the south and at the back, fields, gardens and meadows, with the outskirts of town beyond them… There you have a sketch plan of the dwelling in which the most poignant and anguished days of my life were spent, the dwelling where our adventures ebbed and flowed, breaking like waves on a solitary rock…

  The transfer lottery – a decision by a school inspector or a departmental préfet2 – had brought us there. One day, towards the end of the holidays, long ago, a peasant’s cart, going on ahead of our goods and chattels, set my mother and me down in front of the little rusty gate. Some kids who had been stealing peaches from the garden fled silently through gaps in the hedge. My mother, whom we called ‘Millie’, and who was the most methodical housewife that I have ever known, went directly into the rooms full of dusty straw and immediately announced in despair – as she did at every move we made – that our furniture would never fit into such a badly designed house. She came out to confide her troubles in me and, as she spoke, gently wiped my little face, blackened by the journey. Then she went back to make an inventory of all the doorways and windows that would have to be replaced if the quarters were to be made habitable… And I, meanwhile, under a large straw hat with ribbons on it, stayed back on the gravel of this unfamiliar courtyard, waiting, ferreting around in a tentative way by the well and under the shed.

  At least, this is how I imagine our arrival today; because whenever I try to recapture the distant memory of that first evening, waiting in our courtyard at Sainte-Agathe, what I remember are, in fact, other times of waiting, and I see myself with both hands resting on the bars of the gate, anxiously looking out for someone coming down the main street. And if I try to visualize the first night that I had to spend in my garret, between the first-floor storerooms, what I recall are actually other nights: I am no longer alone in the room; a great, restless, friendly shadow wanders back and forth along the wall. This whole, peaceful landscape – the school, Old Martin’s field with its three walnut trees and the garden, filled every day from four o’clock onwards by visiting women – is forever enlivened and transformed in my memory by the presence of the person who caused such an upheaval in our adolescent years and who, even after he had gone, did not leave us in peace.

  Yet we had already been there for ten years when Meaulnes came.

  I was fifteen. It was a cold Sunday in November, the first day of autumn, suggesting the winter to come. All day, Millie had been waiting for a carriage from the station that was to bring her a hat for the cold weather. In the morning, she missed Mass, and I, sitting in the choir with the other children, had looked anxiously towards the bell tower, right up to the sermon, expecting to see her come in with her new hat.

  In the afternoon, I had to go to Vespers by myself.

  ‘In any case,’ she said, to cheer me up, brushing my child’s outfit with her hand, ‘even if the hat had arrived, I would certainly have had to devote Sunday to adjusting it.’

  In winter, that was how we often spent our Sundays. In the morning, my father would set off for some distant pond shrouded in mist, to fish for pike from a boat, and my mother, retiring until nightfall to her dark bedroom, would darn her simple clothes. She shut herself up in that way because she was afraid that someone or other, one of her friends as poor as she was, and as proud, might catch her at it. So, after Vespers, I would wait in the cold dining room, reading, until she opened the door to show me how the clothes looked on her.

  That particular Sunday, an event in front of the church kept me outside after the service. The children had gathered to watch a christening in the porch. On the town square, several men, dressed in their firemen’s jackets, had formed columns and were stamping their feet in the cold as they listened to Boujardon, the fire chief, getting entangled in the complexities of drill…

  The baptismal bell stopped suddenly like a peal of festive bells that had mistaken the time and place. Boujardon and his men, their weapons slung across their backs, were jogging away with the fire-engine, and I saw them vanish round the corner followed by four silent boys whose thick soles crushed the twigs on the frosty road down which I did not dare follow them.

  The only life left in the village was in the Café Daniel, where you could hear the customers’ muffled voices rise and fall. As for me, hugging the wall of the great courtyard that separated our house from the village, I came to the little iron gateway, a little anxious at arriving late.

  It was half open and I saw at once that something unusual was afoot.

  At the dining-room door – the nearest of the five glazed doors opening on to the courtyard – a woman with grey hair was leaning forward and trying to peer through the curtains. She was small, and wearing an old-fashioned black-velvet bonnet. She had a sharp, thin face, now looking worn with anxiety. I am not sure what premonition made me stop on the first step in front of the gate when I saw her.

  ‘Where has he gone? Oh, my God!’ she was muttering. ‘He was with me just now. He has already been all round the house. Perhaps he has run away.’

  And between each sentence she tapped three times on the window, so lightly that you could hardly hear it.

  No one came to open to the unknown visitor. No doubt, Millie had got her hat from the station and was shut in the red room, oblivious to everything, in front of a bed strewn with old ribbons and flattened feathers, sewing, unsewing and remaking her poor hat… And, sure enough, when I did come into the dining room with the visitor right behind me, my mother appeared, both hands holding lengths of brass wire, with ribbons and feathers on her head, not yet quite assembled. She smiled, her blue eyes tired from working at close of day, and told
me:

  ‘Look! I was waiting to show you…’

  Then, seeing the woman sitting in the large armchair at the back of the room, she stopped in embarrassment and quickly took off her hat which, for the remainder of what followed, she held pressed to her bosom, like a nest turned over in the crook of her right arm.

  The woman in the bonnet, who was hugging an umbrella and a leather handbag between her knees, began to explain, gently nodding and making a polite clicking sound with her tongue. She had fully regained her composure and even, when she started to talk about her son, acquired a superior, mysterious air that intrigued us.

  They had come together by car from La Ferté-d’Angillon, which was fourteen kilometres from Sainte-Agathe. A widow – and, as she gave us to understand, very rich – she had lost the younger of her two children, Antoine, who had died one day on coming home from school, after bathing with his brother in an unhealthy pond. She had decided to give us the elder boy, Augustin, as a boarder in the upper school.

  At once, she began to sing the praises of this new boy she was bringing us. I no longer recognized the grey-haired woman I had seen bending over by the door a minute earlier, with the imploring, fraught look of a mother hen which has lost the wild one of her brood.

  The admiring account that she gave us of her son was quite surprising: he loved to please her and would sometimes walk for miles along the banks of the river, barefoot, to find moorhens’ and wild ducks’ eggs for her hidden among the reeds… He also set snares for birds and a few nights ago had found a pheasant in the woods, caught by the neck.

  I gave Millie a look of astonishment: I would hardly dare go home if I had a tear in my smock.

  But my mother was not listening. In fact, she motioned to the lady to keep quiet and, carefully putting her ‘nest’ down on the table, got up silently as though trying to surprise someone.