The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  Without even a glance, as though the thought had long been hatching inside me, unconsciously, and had only been waiting for that moment to emerge from its shell, I guessed what he meant. Standing by a lantern at the door of the caravan, the young unknown person had undone his bandage and thrown a cloak over his shoulders. There he was, in the smoky light, as he had once been in the candlelight in the room at the château, with his fine, aquiline, clean-shaven face. He was pale, with half-open lips and hastily leafing through a sort of little, red-bound book that must have been a pocket atlas. Apart from a scar across his temple, disappearing under the mass of hair, he was just as The Great Meaulnes had minutely described him to me: the fiancé from the Strange Estate.

  It was clear that he had taken off his bandage so that we would recognize him. But no sooner had The Great Meaulnes leapt up and let out that cry than the young man went back into the caravan, after giving us a complicit look and smiling, in his usual way, with a kind of melancholy.

  ‘And the other one!’ Meaulnes said urgently. ‘Why didn’t I recognize him straightaway! He was the pierrot from there, from the fête…’

  He started to go down the rows towards him. But Ganache had already closed all the entrances to the ring. One by one, he was turning off the four circus lights, and we were forced to follow the crowd as it made its way out, very slowly, channelled between the parallel benches, while we were stamping our feet with impatience in the gloom.

  As soon as he was outside, at last, The Great Meaulnes dashed towards the caravan, rushed up the steps and knocked on the door. But everything was already shut. No doubt, in the caravan with its curtains, as in the cart belonging to the pony, the goat and the performing birds, everyone was already gathered in and starting to sleep.

  VIII

  THE GENDARMES!

  We had to join up with the crowd of men and women making their way back towards the school through the dark streets. Now we understood everything. The tall white figure that Meaulnes had seen on the last evening of the celebration running between the trees was Ganache, who had picked up the heartbroken fiancé and fled with him. Frantz de Galais had accepted this wild life full of risks, games and adventures. It was like going back to his childhood…

  Up to now, he had kept his name from us and pretended not to know the way back to the estate, no doubt because he was afraid that he would be forced to return to his parents. But why had he suddenly seen fit that evening to make himself known to us and to let us guess the whole truth?

  How many plans The Great Meaulnes was making as the crowd of spectators slowly dispersed around the town. He decided that he would go and look for Frantz the very next morning, which was a Thursday. Then the two of them would set off for there! What a journey it would be on the wet road. Frantz would explain everything, it would all be settled, and the wonderful adventure would start again at the point where it had been broken off…

  For my part, I was walking through the darkness with a vague weight pressing on my heart. Everything was combining to make me happy, from the small pleasure that I gained from anticipating the Thursday holiday to the immense discovery that we had just made by some astonishing piece of luck. And I remember that, with this sudden feeling of generosity in my heart, I went over to the ugliest of the notary’s daughters – the one to whom, as a punishment, I was sometimes required to offer my arm – and spontaneously took her hand.

  Bitter memories! Vain hopes crushed!

  The next day, at eight o’clock, as the two of us came into the church square, with our brightly shining shoes, our well-polished belt buckles and our new caps, Meaulnes – who up to then had been trying not to smile when he looked at me – gave a shout and started to run into the empty square… In the place where the tent and the caravan had been, only a broken pot and some rags remained… The gypsies had gone.

  A little wind, which seemed icy to us, was blowing. I felt as though with every step we took we would trip up on the hard, stony ground of the square and fall over. Twice, Meaulnes made as though to run, firstly along the road to Le Vieux-Nançay, then along the road to Saint-Loup-des-Bois. He shaded his eyes with his hand, hoping for a moment that they had only just left. What could we do? There were the tracks of ten carts crisscrossing the square, then vanishing on the hard surface of the road. There was nothing for it but to stand there, helpless.

  And while we were going back through the village, where Thursday morning was beginning, four mounted gendarmes, who had been alerted by Delouche the previous evening, galloped into the square and deployed themselves around it to seal off every entrance, like dragoons reconnoitring a village. But it was too late. Ganache, the chicken thief, had fled with his friend. The gendarmes found no one: neither Ganache nor the person who had loaded the wagons with the chickens that he had strangled. Informed by Jasmin’s rash but timely remark, Frantz must have learnt suddenly how his friend and he managed to survive when the moneybox in the caravan was empty. Filled with shame and fury, he must have immediately drawn up an itinerary and decided to hurry away before the arrival of the gendarmes. But now, when his only fear was that they would try to take him back to his father’s home, he wanted to show himself to us without his bandage before he vanished.

  Only one thing remained unclear: how had Ganache managed to rob the farmyards and fetch a nursing sister to treat his friend’s high temperature? But wasn’t that just typical of the poor devil? A thief and vagrant on the one hand and a good companion on the other…

  IX

  IN SEARCH OF THE LOST PATH

  On our way back, the sun was clearing the light mist of morning, the housewives on the porches of their homes were shaking carpets or chatting and, in the fields and woods on the outskirts of the little town, the most radiant spring morning I can remember in my life was just beginning.

  All the older pupils in the school were to come in at around eight o’clock that Thursday, so that some could spend the morning preparing for the Certificat d’études supérieures and others the examination for the Ecole Normale.11 When the two of us reached the school – Meaulnes so full of agitation and regret that he could not keep still and I feeling very downcast – the place was empty. A ray of fresh sunshine was glancing off the dust on a worm-holed bench and on the chipped varnish of a planisphere.

  How could we stay there, poring over our books and thinking about our disappointment, when everything was calling us outside: the birds chasing one another through the branches by the window, the other pupils escaping to the woods and meadows, and most of all the urgent need as soon as possible to try out the partial itinerary that the gypsy had checked – the last item in our almost empty bag, the last key on the ring when all the rest had been tried? It was more than we could resist! Meaulnes strode up and down, went over to the windows, looked into the garden, then came back and looked towards the town as though waiting for someone who would surely not come.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said at last. ‘It occurs to me that it may perhaps not be as far as we think… Frantz has cut out a whole part of the route that I showed on my plan. That suggests that the mare could have made a long detour while I was asleep…’

  I was half seated on the corner of a large table with one foot on the ground and the other dangling, my head bent and with an air of listlessness and discouragement.

  ‘But on the way back,’ I pointed out, ‘your journey in the berlin lasted all night.’

  ‘We set out at midnight,’ he said eagerly. ‘He put me down at four in the morning, around six kilometres to the west of Sainte-Agathe – while I had started from the station road in the east. So we have to subtract those six kilometres between Sainte-Agathe and the Lost Land. Honestly, I think that once we’re through the Bois des Communaux, then we can’t be more than two leagues from the place we’re looking for.’

  ‘And those are precisely the two leagues missing from your map.’

  ‘That’s right. And the far end of the Bois is a good league and a half from here, bu
t for a fast walker, it could be done in a morning.’

  At that moment, Moucheboeuf arrived. He had an annoying habit of appearing to be a good pupil, not by working any harder than the rest, but by getting himself noticed at times like these.

  ‘I knew it!’ he said, triumphantly. ‘I knew you’d be the only ones who’d be here. All the others have gone to the Bois des Communaux – with Jasmin Delouche leading, because he knows where to find the nests.’

  And, in his holier-than-thou way, he started to tell us everything that they had said, making fun of the school, Monsieur Seurel and us, as they were planning the expedition.

  ‘If they’re in the woods, I expect I’ll see them on my way,’ said Meaulnes. ‘Because I’m going there myself. I’ll be back around half-past twelve.’

  Moucheboeuf was speechless.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ Augustin asked me, pausing for a moment at the half-open door, allowing a gust of air warm from the sun to sweep into the grey classroom accompanied by a medley of cries, shouts and birdsong, the sound of a bucket on the lip of a well and the distant crack of a whip.

  ‘No,’ I said, though I was sorely tempted. ‘I can’t, because of Monsieur Seurel. But hurry back, I’ll be waiting for you.’

  He made a vague gesture and left, hurriedly, full of hope.

  When Monsieur Seurel arrived, at around ten o’clock, he had exchanged his black alpaca jacket for a fisherman’s coat with huge buttoned pockets, a straw hat and short, shiny gaiters holding the bottom of his trousers. I think he was not at all surprised to find no one there and he paid no attention to Moucheboeuf, who told him three times what the boys had said: ‘If he needs us, let him come and fetch us!’

  Instead he ordered: ‘Put away your things, get your caps and we’ll comb the woods for them ourselves… will you be able to walk that far, François?’

  I said I could, and we set off.

  It was agreed that Moucheboeuf would guide Monsieur Seurel and act as decoy… That is, since he knew the woodland where the nest-hunters would be operating, he could shout out loudly from time to time, ‘Hey! Hello! Giraudat! Delouche! Where are you? Are there any? Have you found some?’

  As for me, much to my delight, I was given the task of following the eastern edge of the wood, in case any fleeting schoolboys tried to escape on that side.

  Now, in the map amended by the gypsy, which I had many times studied with Meaulnes, it seemed that there was a single-lane track, a dirt road, leaving from this edge of the wood and heading towards the Estate. Suppose I should discover it that morning! I had started to convince myself that before midday I should be on the road towards the lost château…

  What a wonderful walk. As soon as we had passed the Slope and gone round the Mill, I left my two companions, Monsieur Seurel, who looked as though he were going off to war – I truly think he had put an old pistol in his pocket – and the treacherous Moucheboeuf.

  Following a transverse path, I soon reached the edge of the wood – alone in the countryside for the first time in my life, like an army patrol that has lost touch with its corporal.

  This, I should think, is something close to that mysterious happiness that Meaulnes apprehended one day. The whole morning is mine, to explore the outskirts of the wood, the coolest, most hidden place thereabouts, while my big brother is also away on a journey of discovery. It is like a dried-up riverbed. I am walking beneath the low branches of trees that I do not know by name; they must be elms. Just now, I jumped over a stile at the end of the path and here I am, in this broad avenue of green grass flowing beneath the leaves, brushing through the nettles in places and knocking down the tall stalks of valerian.

  Sometimes, for a few steps, my feet are resting on a bank of fine sand. And in the silence, I can hear a bird: I think it’s a nightingale, but I must be wrong because they only sing in the evenings… This bird is relentlessly repeating the same phrase: voice of the morning, a recital in the shade, a delicious invitation to a journey between the elms. Invisible and obstinate, it seems to be accompanying me through the leaves.

  For the first time, I too am on the road to adventure. No longer am I hunting for shells washed up by the sea under Monsieur Seurel’s guidance, or wild orchids that even the schoolmaster does not recognize, or even, as often happened in Old Martin’s field, the deeply sunk, dried-up spring covered by a grating and buried under so many weeds that every time we would take longer finding it… I am looking for something still more mysterious. I’m looking for the passage that they write about in books, the one with the entrance that the prince, weary with travelling, cannot find. This is the one you find at the remotest hour of morning, long after you have forgotten that eleven o’clock is coming, or midday. And suddenly, as you part the branches in the dense undergrowth, with that hesitant movement of the hands, held unevenly at face height, you see something like a long, dark avenue leading to a tiny circle of light…

  But while I am intoxicating myself with these hopes and ideas, I suddenly come out into a kind of clearing which turns out to be nothing more than a field. Without expecting it, I have reached the end of the Bois des Communaux, which I had always imagined to be an infinite distance away. Now on my right, between piles of wood, buzzing in the shade, is the keeper’s house. Two pairs of stockings are drying on the window ledge. In previous years, when we reached the entrance to the wood, we would always say, pointing to a patch of light far away at the end of the immense dark lane: ‘Down there is the keeper’s house, Baladier’s house.’ But never did we go that far. Sometimes we would hear people say, as if talking about some extraordinary expedition, ‘He went as far as the keeper’s house!’

  This time, I’ve gone as far as Baladier’s house – and found nothing…

  My tired leg was starting to hurt, and I was suffering from the heat, which I had not felt up to then. I was afraid of undertaking the whole of the return trip by myself when I heard Monsieur Seurel’s bird decoy near by and Moucheboeuf’s voice, then others calling me…

  There was a band of six big lads among whom only the treacherous Moucheboeuf seemed triumphant. They were Giraudat, Auberger, Delage and others… Thanks to the birdcall, some had been caught climbing a wild cherry tree in the middle of a clearing and the others as they were robbing a woodpecker’s nest. Giraudat, the simpleton with the puffy eyes and dirty smock, had hidden the little birds on his belly between his shirt and his skin. Two of their friends had fled when Monsieur Seurel came up, probably Delouche and little Coffin. At first, they had laughed in answer to ‘Mouchevache’ (as they called him), and the wood threw their jokes as echoes back to them; while he, foolishly, thinking he had them in the bag, angrily replied: ‘You might as well come down, you know! Monsieur Seurel is here…’

  At that, everything suddenly went quiet: they were silently escaping through the woods. And since they knew every inch of the place, there was no sense in trying to catch them. No one knew, either, where The Great Meaulnes had gone. They had not heard his voice and decided to give up the search.

  It was after midday when we started back towards Sainte-Agathe, slowly, our heads hanging, tired and grubby. As we came out of the wood and had shaken and rubbed the mud off our shoes on the dry road, the sun began to shine brightly. It was no longer that fresh, glowing spring morning. Afternoon sounds could be heard. Here and there, a cock crowed – a forlorn cry! – in one of the isolated farms beside the road. Coming down the Slope, we paused for a moment to chat with the farm hands who had resumed their work in the fields after lunch. They were leaning on the gate, and Monsieur Seurel told them, ‘What a bunch of rascals! Why, just look at Giraudat: he put the fledglings in his shirt and they did just what you’d expect. A fine mess!’

  I felt as though it was my disaster as well that the farmhands were laughing about, shaking their heads; but they did not entirely blame the boys, whom they knew well. They even told us, confidentially, when Monsieur Seurel had resumed his place at the head of the column: ‘Another one came past,
a tall one, you know him… On his way he must have met up with the cart from Les Granges, and they gave him a lift; he got down, covered in mud and his clothes all torn, just here, at the road to Les Granges! We told him we’d seen you go by this morning, but that you weren’t back yet. And off he went, taking his time, towards Sainte-Agathe.’

  In fact, The Great Meaulnes was waiting for us, sitting on a promontory of the Pont des Glacis, looking utterly exhausted. When Monsieur Seurel asked him, he said that he had also gone off looking for the truants, and when I questioned him he just whispered back, shaking his head in disappointment, ‘No, nothing! Nothing like it!’

  After lunch, in the closed classroom, which was dark and empty in the midst of a sunlit land, he sat down at one of the long tables and, with his head in his hands, he lapsed into a long, heavy and miserable sleep. Around evening, after thinking about it for a long time, as though he had just taken an important decision, he wrote a letter to his mother. And that is all I remember of that dreary end to a great day of disappointments.

  X

  THE WASHING

  We had counted too soon on the arrival of spring.

  On Monday evening, we wanted to get our homework done immediately after four o’clock, as in mid-summer, and so that we could see more clearly, we brought two large tables out into the courtyard. But all at once the weather clouded over, a drop of rain fell on an exercise book and we hurried back inside. And then, silently, from the great hall plunged in darkness, we watched through the wide windows as the clouds raced across the grey sky.

  At that, Meaulnes, who was watching with us, one hand on a window catch, could not repress the remark (though he seemed annoyed at feeling so much regret inside him): ‘Oh, the clouds were running differently from that when I was on the road in the cart from La Belle Etoile!’