The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  At that moment an old peasant man appeared at the door with an armful of wood, which he threw down on the tiles. The woman explained to him – very loudly, as though he was deaf – what the young man was looking for.

  ‘Why, that’s easy,’ he said simply. ‘But come in close, Monsieur, you’re not getting the fire.’

  Shortly after that, both of them were sitting down next to the andirons, with the old man breaking up the wood to put it on the fire and Meaulnes eating a bowl of milk with some bread which they had given him. Our traveller, delighted at finding himself in this humble abode after so many uncertainties, thought that his odd adventure was over: he was already planning how he would come back later with his friends to see these good people. He didn’t know that this was just a pause and that his journey would shortly resume.

  He soon asked if they could put him back on the road to La Motte. And, reverting bit by bit to the truth, he told them how he and his carriage had been separated from the other hunters and that he was now completely lost.

  The man and woman were so insistent that he must stay overnight with them and only leave at daylight that eventually Meaulnes accepted and went out to look for his mare to put her in the stable.

  ‘Look out for the holes on the track,’ the man told him.

  Meaulnes did not dare admit that he had not come by ‘the track’. He almost asked the old man if he would go with him. He hesitated for a moment on the doorstep and was so undecided that he almost reeled backwards. Then he went out into the dark yard.

  X

  THE SHEEPFOLD

  To get his bearings, he climbed up the bank off which he had earlier jumped.

  Slowly and with difficulty, as he had done the first time, he made his way through the grass and past puddles and across willow fences, towards the trap, where he had left it at the far end of the meadow. But it was no longer there… His head pounding, he stood quite still and tried to recognize the sounds of the night, thinking at every moment that he could hear the clinking of the mare’s bridle not far off. He went all round the outside of the meadow. The gate was half open, half lying on the ground, as though a cart wheel had gone over it. The mare must have escaped through there on its own.

  He walked a little way back up the lane and stumbled over the blanket, which must have fallen off the mare’s back. He concluded that it had set off in this direction and started to run after it.

  His only thought was a mad urge to recover the carriage at any cost, and this furious determination, which was something like panic, sent all the blood rushing to his head as he ran. From time to time, he stumbled over a rut. When the road bent, he stumbled into the hedges in the total darkness and, already too tired to stop in time, fell on the brambles, with his arms outstretched, tearing his hands to protect his face. Sometimes, he stopped, listened and then set off again. Once, he did think he had heard the sound of a carriage, but it was only a noisy cart going by a long way off, on another road, to the left.

  Eventually, his knee, which had been hit by the running board, was hurting so much that he had to stop. It also occurred to him that if the mare had not run off at a gallop, he would have caught her up a long time ago. He also thought that a carriage could not get lost in that way and that someone would be bound to find it. So, at length, he retraced his steps, exhausted, angry and barely able to walk.

  Eventually, he thought he had returned to somewhere in the vicinity of where he had started and soon saw the lights of the house which he had been looking for. There was a sunken path through the hedgerow.

  ‘This must be the track that the old man mentioned,’ Augustin thought.

  He set off along it, happy at no longer having to climb over hedges and banks. After a short while, the path veered off to the left, and the light seemed to move to the right, so that when he got to a crossroads, Meaulnes was in such a hurry to get back to the little cottage that he did not think before taking a path that seemed to be leading directly to it. But he had hardly taken ten steps in that direction than the light vanished, either because it was concealed by a hedge, or because the peasants had grown tired of waiting and closed the shutters. The boy bravely set out across country, walking straight towards the place where the light had been shining a short time earlier. Then, after crossing another fence, he found himself on a new path.

  And so it was that Meaulnes lost his way and cut the ties that bound him to the people he had just left.

  Depressed and almost exhausted, he decided despairingly to follow this new path right to the end. A hundred yards further on, he came out into a wide, grey meadow with what appeared to be juniper trees spaced out in it and a dark building in a fold of the ground. Meaulnes walked across to it. It turned out to be just a sort of large, abandoned cattle shed or sheepfold. The door creaked as it opened. When the wind drove away the clouds, the moonlight shone through gaps in the walls. Everywhere, there was a musty smell.

  Without looking any further, Meaulnes lay down on the damp straw with his head cradled in his hands and his elbows on the ground. After taking off his belt, he curled up in his smock, with his knees up to his belly. It was now that he thought of the mare’s blanket that he had left on the road, and felt so miserable and annoyed with himself that he had a strong desire to weep…

  So he tried to think of other things. Chilled to the bone as he was, he remembered a dream, or rather a vision that he had had as a small child – something he had never mentioned to anyone. One morning, instead of waking up in his room where his trousers and his coats were hanging, he found himself in a long green room with tapestries like forest greenery. The light flowing into this place was so sweet that you felt you could taste it. Beside the nearest window, a girl was sewing, with her back turned to him, as though waiting for him to wake up. He had not had the strength to slip out of bed and walk through this enchanted mansion. He had gone back to sleep. But the next time, he swore that he would get up – tomorrow morning, perhaps!

  XI

  THE MYSTERIOUS ESTATE

  As soon as it was light, he set out again. But his swollen knee hurt, so he had to stop and sit down constantly because the pain was so bad. As it happened, this was the most desolate region of the Sologne, and throughout the morning the only person he saw was a shepherdess in the distance bringing home her flock. Even though he called out to her and tried to run, she vanished before he could make her hear.

  Despite that, he went on walking in her direction, but with painful slowness. Not a house nor a soul was to be seen. There was not even the cry of a curlew in the marshes. The December sun shone down on this perfect wilderness, clear and cold.

  It was around three o’clock in the afternoon when he finally observed the spire of a grey turret rising above some fir trees.

  ‘An old, abandoned manor house,’ he thought. ‘Or some deserted pigeon loft.’ And he continued on his way, without quickening his pace.

  Between two white posts, at the corner of the wood, Meaulnes found the entrance to an avenue and started down it. After a few steps, he paused, astonished, overcome by a feeling that he could not explain. Though he had been walking with the same tired legs and the icy wind was freezing his lips, at times taking his breath away, none the less an extraordinary feeling of contentment raised his spirits, a feeling of perfect, almost intoxicating tranquillity: the certainty that he had reached his goal and that henceforth only happiness awaited him. This was how, in earlier times, he had felt on the eve of the great summer festivals, when at nightfall fir trees were being set up in the village streets and the window of his bedroom was obscured by their branches.

  ‘Such happiness,’ he thought, ‘because I am coming to this old dovecot, home to owls and draughts!’

  He stopped, irritated with himself, wondering if it would not be better to turn back and carry on to the next village. He had been thinking of this for a moment, hanging his head, when he suddenly noticed that the avenue had been swept in wide, regular circles, as they used to do at home for
great occasions: the way beneath his feet was like the main street of La Ferté on Assumption Day morning! He could not have been more surprised if he had turned a corner of the avenue to see a crowd of people celebrating and raising the dust in the month of June.

  ‘Can there be some festivity taking place in this wilderness?’ he wondered.

  He went forward to the first corner and heard voices coming towards him. He hurried off to one side, into the bushy young trees, crouching down and holding his breath. They were children’s voices. A group of children came by, quite close to him. One of them, probably a little girl, was talking in such measured and sensible tones that Meaulnes could not help smiling, even though he hardly understood the meaning of her words.

  ‘Only one thing bothers me,’ she was saying, ‘and that is the matter of the horses. You see, we’ll never stop Daniel from riding the big yellowish-grey pony!’

  ‘You’ll never stop me,’ a boy said, in a jeering tone of voice. ‘Aren’t we allowed to do just as we like? Even if it means hurting ourselves, if that’s what we want.’

  And the voices faded into the distance, just as another group of children was approaching.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, if the ice has melted,’ a girl was saying, ‘we can go out in the boat.’

  ‘But will they let us?’ asked another.

  ‘You know we’re allowed to organize the festivities just as we want.’

  ‘Suppose Frantz were to come back this evening, with his fiancée?’

  ‘Well, he’ll do as we tell him!’

  ‘It must be a wedding,’ Augustin thought. ‘But are the children in charge here? What a peculiar place!’

  He thought he would come out of his hiding-place and ask them where he could find something to eat and drink. He stood up and saw the last group going away. They were three little girls with straight dresses down to their knees. They had pretty hats with ribbons, and each of them had a white feather hanging down behind. One, who had half turned round, was leaning over and listening to her friend as she explained something solemnly with her finger raised.

  ‘I’ll only scare them,’ Meaulnes thought, looking at his torn peasant’s smock and the ill-matching Sainte-Agathe pupil’s belt he had round it.

  Fearing that the children might meet him as they came back down the avenue, he went on through the trees towards the ‘pigeon loft’, though without much idea of what he could ask for when he got there. He was soon halted at the edge of the wood by a low, mossy wall. Beyond it, between the wall and the outhouses, there was a long, narrow courtyard full of carriages, like an inn yard on market day. There were vehicles of every kind and shape: slim little four-seaters, with their shafts in the air; charabancs; old-fashioned bourbonnaises with ornamented sides and even old berlins with their windows up.

  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. Two iron bars of the sort that you find behind stable buildings with their ever-closed shutters had once sealed this opening, but with time they had loosened.

  ‘I’ll go in there,’ the boy thought. ‘And sleep in the hay. Then I’ll set off at dawn, without scaring those pretty little girls.’

  He climbed over the wall, with difficulty because of his wounded knee, and slipping from one carriage to the next and from the seat of a charabanc to the roof of a berlin, he came level with the window and pushed it open silently, like a door.

  He found himself not in a hayloft, but in a huge room with a low ceiling which must have been a bedroom. In the half-dark of the winter evening, you could see that the table, the mantel-piece and even the armchairs were laden with large vases, valuables and old swords. At the far end of the room were curtains, no doubt concealing an alcove.

  Meaulnes had closed the window, as much because of the cold as because he was afraid of being seen from outside. He walked across to the curtain, raised it and discovered a large, low bed, covered in old books with bindings trimmed in gold, lutes with broken strings and candlesticks, all left in a jumble. He pushed them to the back of the alcove and lay down on the bed to rest and to think over the strange adventure in which he was caught up.

  There was a deep silence over the place. Only occasionally could one hear the high wind of December blowing.

  Lying there, Meaulnes even began to wonder if in spite of his strange encounters, in spite of the voices of the children in the avenue, in spite of the carriages piled up against one another, this was not, as he had first thought, merely an old estate abandoned to the loneliness of winter.

  Soon after that, he thought that the wind was carrying the sound of some distant music. It was like a memory, full of charm and nostalgia. He recalled how his mother, when young, would sit down at the piano in the afternoon, in their drawing room, and he, saying nothing, behind the door opening into the garden, would listen to her until night fell…

  ‘Doesn’t that sound as though someone is playing the piano somewhere?’ he thought.

  But he left the question unanswered: overcome by tiredness, he soon fell asleep.

  XII

  WELLINGTON’S ROOM

  It was dark when he woke up. Chilled through, he turned over and over on the bed, creasing and rolling his black smock under him. A dim light shone on the curtains across the alcove.

  Sitting up on the bed, he poked his head out through the curtains. Someone had opened the window, and two green Venetian lanterns had been hung up from the frame.

  But no sooner had Meaulnes managed to glance at this than he heard the sound of muffled footsteps on the landing and voices speaking quietly outside. He sprang back into the alcove, and his hobnailed boots clanged against one of the bronze pieces that he had pushed back against the wall. For a moment, he anxiously held his breath. The footsteps drew nearer, and two figures slipped into the room.

  ‘Don’t make a noise,’ said one of them.

  ‘Why not?’ the other replied. ‘It’s about time he woke up.’

  ‘Have you decked out his room?’

  ‘Yes, like the others’.’

  The wind shook the open window.

  ‘Look,’ the first voice said. ‘You didn’t even close the window. The wind has already blown out one of the lanterns. We’ll have to relight it.’

  ‘Huh!’ said the other, suddenly overcome with idleness and a sense of futility. ‘What’s the point of all these lights facing out into the country, that is, looking at nothing? There’s no one to see them.’

  ‘No one? But people will be coming at times in the night. Over there, on the road, in their carriages they will be very glad to see our lights!’

  Meaulnes heard a match strike. The last one to speak, who seemed to be the leader, carried on in a drawling voice, like a Shakespearean gravedigger: ‘You’re putting green lanterns in Wellington’s room. Why not red ones, then? You don’t know any more about it than I do!’

  Silence.

  ‘Was Wellington American? So, is green an American colour? You’re the actor, the one who’s travelled; you ought to know.’

  ‘Oh, dearie me!’ the ‘actor’ replied. ‘Travelled? Yes I’ve travelled all right. But I didn’t see anything! What can you see from a caravan?’

  Meaulnes peered carefully through the curtains.

  The one in charge was a fat, bare-headed man, wrapped in a vast overcoat. He was holding a long rod hung with many-coloured lanterns and he was calmly sitting with one leg crossed over the other, watching his friend work.

  As for the actor, he cut the most pathetic figure you could imagine. Tall, lean, shivering, with dull, shifty eyes and a moustache hanging over his gap-toothed mouth, suggesting the face of a drowned man dripping on a slab. He was in shirtsleeves, his teeth chattering. Both his words and his gestures indicated the most utter contempt for himself.

  After a moment’s reflection that was at once sour and comic, he went over
to his friend and, spreading both arms wide, addressed him confidentially: ‘Do you know what? I don’t know why they had to bring in filth like us to wait on people in a fête of this kind! That’s what I think…’

  But without taking any notice of this heartfelt declaration, the fat man went on looking at his work, with his legs crossed, yawned, sniffed quietly, and then, turning his back on the other, went away, with his rod over his shoulder, saying, ‘Come on, off we go! It’s time to get dressed for dinner.’

  The gypsy followed, but as he went past the alcove, he said, bowing and in a sarcastic tone of voice, ‘Mr Lie-abed, it’s about time you woke up and got dressed as a marquis, even though you’re just a skivvy like me. And you will go down to the fancy-dress ball, since that is what these little gentlemen and ladies desire.’

  And, with a final bow, he added, in the voice of a hawker at a fairground, ‘Our friend Maloyau, member of the kitchen staff, will appear in the role of Harlequin and your humble servant in that of the great Pierrot.’

  XIII

  THE STRANGE FETE

  As soon as they had gone, the boy left his hiding place. His feet were frozen and his joints stiff, but he was rested and his knee appeared to have healed.

  ‘Go down to dinner?’ he thought. ‘I’ll certainly do that. I shall just be a guest whose name everyone has forgotten. In any case, I’m not an intruder here: it’s quite clear that M. Maloyau and his friend were expecting me…’

  Coming out of the total darkness of the alcove, he could see quite clearly in the room, lit as it was by the green lanterns.