The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  ‘Here you are,’ they said quietly. ‘It’s her.’

  A few moments later, the strange rig stopped in front of the glass door. An old farm wagon with rounded panels and little moulded cornices, of a kind that we had never seen thereabouts, an old white horse carrying his head so low as he walked that he seemed constantly to be trying to graze on some grass along the road, and on the seat – I say this with all the simplicity of my heart, fully aware of what I say – perhaps the most beautiful young woman that ever there was in this world.

  Never have I seen such charm combined with such dignity. Her clothes made her waist so slender than she seemed fragile. A great brown cloak, which she took off as she came in, was thrown around her shoulders: she was the most solemn of girls, the most delicate of women. A heavy mass of hair hung across her forehead and over her delicately featured, finely moulded face. The summer had left two freckles on her pure white skin… I could see only one flaw in so much beauty: when she was sad, upset or simply deep in thought, her clear complexion became faintly mottled with red, like that of certain people who are very ill without knowing it. At such times, the admiration of the person looking at her would give way to a kind of pity that was all the more heartrending for being unexpected.

  At least, that is what I learnt while she was slowly getting out of the cart and Marie-Louise at last introduced me to the young woman, quite unselfconsciously, inviting me to talk to her.

  They brought over a waxed chair for her and she sat with her back to the counter while we remained standing. She seemed to know the shop well and to like it. My Aunt Julie was informed at once and arrived, so the time that she spent talking, demurely, with her hands crossed in front of her, gently nodding her peasant head in its white cap, put off the moment that I was slightly dreading, when I should have to speak to her.

  It proved very simple.

  ‘So,’ Mademoiselle de Galais said, ‘you’ll soon be a teacher?’

  My aunt lit the porcelain lamp above our heads, which cast its pale light across the shop. I saw the girl’s soft, childlike face, her blue eyes, which had such innocence; and I was at first surprised by her voice, so firm and grave. When she finished speaking, her eyes would settle on something else and stay there, not moving, while she waited for an answer, and she bit her lip a little.

  ‘I should teach, myself,’ she said, ‘if Monsieur de Galais wanted me to. I should teach little boys, as your mother does…’

  And she smiled, showing that my cousins had spoken to her about me.

  ‘The reason is,’ she went on, ‘that with me the village people are always polite, kind and helpful. And I am very fond of them. But I claim no credit for that.

  ‘On the other hand, with the schoolmistress, they are quarrelsome and miserly, aren’t they? There are endless arguments over lost pencil cases, exercise books being too dear or children who don’t learn… Well, I should stick up to them and they would like me in spite of that. It would be much harder…’

  At that, without smiling, she resumed her thoughtful, childlike pose, and her blue eyes were still.

  All three of us were embarrassed at the ease with which she spoke of delicate matters, of things that are secret and subtle, and not usually well expressed outside books. There was a moment’s silence, then slowly a discussion began…

  However, with a kind of regret and animosity about something mysterious in her life, the young lady continued:

  ‘And then I’d teach the boys to be sensible and wise and well behaved, as only I know how. I wouldn’t give them an urge to go travelling all around the place as I expect you will, Monsieur Seurel, when you’re a junior master. I’d teach them how to find the happiness that is right beside them, but which they don’t see…’

  Marie-Louise and Firmin were as speechless as I was. We stood there without a word. She realized we were embarrassed and stopped, biting her lip and lowering her gaze. Then she smiled, as though making fun of us, and said, ‘So, there may be some tall, crazy young man looking for me at the furthest corner of the world, while I am here in Madame Florentin’s shop under this lamp, with my old horse waiting for me at the door. If that young man could see me, I expect he wouldn’t believe his eyes.’

  Seeing her smile emboldened me, and I felt that it was the moment for me to say, also with a laugh, ‘And perhaps I know that tall, crazy young man?’

  She gave me a keen look.

  At that moment, the bell on the door rang and two country women came in carrying baskets.

  ‘Come into the “dining room”, you won’t be disturbed there,’ my aunt said, opening the kitchen door. And, as Mademoiselle de Galais was refusing and wanted to leave at once, she added, ‘Monsieur de Galais is here, talking to Florentin over the fire.’

  Even in August, there was always a crackling fire of fir branches in the big kitchen. Here, too, there was a porcelain lamp lit, while an old man with a gentle face, lined and clean-shaven, almost always silent like someone weighed down with age and memories, was sitting next to Florentin in front of two glasses of marc.

  Florentin welcomed us.

  ‘François!’ he shouted, in his loud, hawker’s voice, as though a river and several hectares of land lay between us. ‘I’ve just organized an outing beside the Cher for next Thursday. Some of us will go hunting, others will fish; some will dance and others bathe! You come on horseback, Mademoiselle. Monsieur de Galais and I are agreed, it’s all settled…’

  ‘And you, François!’ he added, as though just thinking of this. ‘You can bring your friend, Monsieur Meaulnes… That’s his name, isn’t it? Meaulnes?’

  Mademoiselle de Galais stood up, the colour suddenly draining from her face. And at that very moment, I remembered that Meaulnes, once, in the mysterious domain, near the lake, had told her his name…

  When she held out her hand to say goodbye, there was a secret understanding between us, clearer than if many words had passed – an understanding that only death would break and a friendship more poignant than a great love.

  Next morning, at four o’clock, Firmin was knocking on the door of the little room that I occupied in the yard for the guineafowl. It was still dark, and I had a good deal of trouble finding my things on the table, which was cluttered with copper candlesticks and little, brand-new statues of saints that had been brought from the shop on the day before my arrival, to furnish my room. I could hear Firmin in the yard, pumping up the tyres of my bicycle, and my aunt in the kitchen blowing on the fire. The sun was barely up when I left. But I had a long day ahead of me: first I would go and have lunch at Sainte-Agathe to explain why I had been away so long, and then, carrying on, I was due to arrive before evening at La Ferté-d’Angillon, at the home of my friend, Augustin Meaulnes.

  III

  AN APPARITION

  I had never before been on a long cycle ride: this was the first. But, despite my bad knee, Jasmin had for some time been teaching me to ride. And if for an ordinary young man a bicycle is a very enjoyable conveyance, just imagine what it would have seemed to a poor boy like myself, who until recently had had to limp along, bathed in sweat, after less than four kilometres! Plunging down from the top of a hill in the depths of the countryside, discovering the distant road ahead like a bird on the wing and watching it open and blossom around you, dashing through a village and taking it in with a single glance… So far only in dreams had I experienced such delightful, airy motion; even climbing the hills I felt full of energy, because, I have to admit, it was the road to Meaulnes’ place that was flying beneath my wheels…

  ‘A little before the entrance to the town,’ Meaulnes had told me earlier when he was describing it to me, ‘you can see a large wheel with vanes that turn in the wind.’ He did not know the purpose of it, or perhaps was pretending not to, in order to fire my curiosity.

  It was only towards the end of that late August day that, in a vast field, I saw the great wheel, which probably pumped up water for a nearby farm. Behind the poplars in the meadow you co
uld already see the first outlying buildings of the little town. As I followed the wide bend that the road took to avoid crossing the stream, the countryside opened up until, reaching the bridge, I finally came upon the main street of the village.

  Cows were grazing, hidden among the reeds in the meadow, and I could hear their bells as I looked at the place to which I was about to bring such a serious piece of news. I had got down from my cycle and was holding the handlebar in both hands. The houses were all lined up along a ditch running the length of the street, and you entered them by crossing over a little wooden bridge: they were like so many boats, with their sails furled, moored in the evening calm. It was the moment when a fire was being lit in every kitchen.

  At this, fear and some vague regret at coming to disturb such peace started to sap my courage. Just then, too, intensifying this sudden feeling of weakness, I remembered that Aunt Moinel lived there, on a little square of La Ferté-Angillon.

  She was one of my great aunts. All her children were dead, and I had been well acquainted with Ernest, the last to go, a tall lad who was to be a schoolmaster. My great uncle Moinel, a former clerk of the court, had followed close after, and my aunt was left all alone in her odd little house where the carpets were made of samples sewn together and the tables covered with paper cockerels, hens and cats, but where the walls were lined with old diplomas, portraits of the dead and medallions formed of dead hair.

  Despite so many sadnesses and so much mourning, she was the personification of eccentricity and good humour. When I had found the little square where she lived, I called her loudly through the half-open door and heard her from the very last of the three adjoining rooms give a little high-pitched shout: ‘Oh, oh! My goodness!’

  She threw her coffee on the fire – how could she be making coffee at this time of day? – and made her appearance… Very upright and wearing a sort of hat-hood-bonnet on the crown of her head, above her vast, protuding forehead, she had something of a Mongolian or Hottentot woman about her; and she gave little laughs, showing what was left of her very small teeth.

  But while I was kissing her, she quickly and awkwardly took the hand that I was holding behind my back; and, with a quite unnecessary air of concealment, she slipped a small coin into it that I didn’t dare look at, though it must have been a one-franc piece. Then, as I appeared to want an explanation, or to thank her, she gave me a dig in the ribs, shouting, ‘Go on with you! I know what it’s like!’

  She had always been poor, always borrowing and always spending. ‘I’ve always been stupid and always unhappy,’ she would say, without bitterness, in her high-pitched voice.

  Certain that I thought about money as much as she did, this good woman would not wait for me to draw breath before slipping her day’s meagre savings into my hand. And from then on, this was how she would always greet me.

  Dinner was as strange – both eccentric and sad – as her welcome had been. She always had a candle within reach and would sometimes take it, leaving me in the shadows, and sometimes put it down on the little table, covered in dishes and vases that were chipped or cracked.

  ‘Now that one,’ she would say, ‘lost its handles when the Prussians broke them off in seventy,14 because they couldn’t take it away.’

  Only then, seeing this vase with its tragic history, did I remember that we had eaten and slept there in the past. My father used to bring me to the Yonne to see a specialist who was meant to heal my knee. We had to take a big express train that came past before daylight… I recalled the sad dinners we used to have and all the old court clerk’s stories as he sat leaning on the table in front of his bottle of pink liquid.

  I also recalled my terrors… After dinner, sitting in front of the fire, my great aunt had taken my father to one side to tell him a story about ghosts: ‘I looked round… Ah! My poor Louis! What did I see? A little grey woman.’ She was said to have her head stuffed with this terrifying rubbish.

  And now that evening, when dinner was over and, tired out by my cycle ride, I was lying in the big bedroom in a checked nightshirt that had belonged to Uncle Moinel, she came and sat by the bed and started to say, in her most mysterious and shrill voice, ‘My poor François, I have to tell you something that I have never told anyone before…’

  I thought, ‘That’s it! Now I’ll be scared stiff the whole night, as I was ten years ago.’

  I listened. She shook her head, staring directly ahead as though telling the story to herself:

  ‘I was coming back from a wedding with Moinel. It was the first that we had been to together since our poor Ernest died, and among the guests was my sister Adèle, whom I hadn’t seen for four years. An old friend of Moinel’s who was very rich had invited her to his son’s wedding at Le Domaine des Sablonnières. We had hired a carriage: it cost us a lot. At around seven in the morning we were driving back along the road, in mid-winter. The sun was rising, and there was absolutely no one around. Then suddenly what did I see on the road ahead? A little man, a little young man standing there, very good-looking, not moving, just watching us drive towards him. As we got nearer, we made out his pretty face, which was so white and so pretty that it scared you!

  ‘I took Moinel’s arm – I was shaking like a leaf… I thought it was the Good Lord himself! I said: “Look! An apparition!”

  ‘He answered me angrily, under his breath, “I’ve seen him! Shut up, you old chatterbox!”

  ‘He didn’t know what to do; then the horse stopped… Close up, the thing had a pale face, the forehead beaded with sweat, and it was wearing a dirty beret and long trousers. We heard a soft voice saying, “I’m not a man, I’m a girl. I’ve run away and I can’t go on. Please could you take me in your carriage, Monsieur and Madame?”

  ‘At once, we told her to get in. No sooner was she sitting down than she fainted. And just guess who it was? The fiancée of the young man from Les Sablonnières, Frantz de Galais, to whose wedding we had been invited!’

  ‘But there was no wedding,’ I said, ‘because the bride ran away.’

  ‘Why, that’s right,’ she said, looking at me sheepishly. ‘There was no wedding, because the poor foolish girl had got a thousand silly ideas into her head, as she told us. She was one of the daughters of a poor weaver. She was sure that so much happiness was not possible, that the young man was too young for her, and that all the wonderful things that he had told her about were imaginary, so when Frantz finally came to get her, Valentine took fright. He was walking with her and her sister in the garden of the archbishop’s palace in Bourges, even though it was cold and very windy. The young man, surely being considerate and because he was in love with the younger sister, paid a lot of attention to the elder one. So my silly girl got I don’t know what ideas into her head. She said she was going to fetch a scarf from the house and there, to make sure she was not followed, she dressed in men’s clothes and ran away down the Paris road.

  ‘Her fiancé received a letter in which she told him that she was going to be with a young man that she loved. It wasn’t true…

  ‘ “I’m happier because of my sacrifice,” she told me, “than I would be as his wife.” Yes, little idiot, but meanwhile he had no intention of marrying her sister. He shot himself with a pistol – they saw the blood in the woods, but never found his body.’

  ‘What did you do with this unfortunate girl?’

  ‘We gave her a sip of brandy, first of all, then something to eat, and she fell asleep in front of the fire when we got home. She spent a good part of the winter here with us.’

  ‘All day long, while it was light, she cut out and sewed dresses, decorated hats and furiously cleaned the house. She was the one who stuck back all the wallpaper that you can see there. And since that time, the swallows have been nesting outside. But in the evening, when night fell and her work was done, she always found an excuse to go out into the yard, into the garden or on the porch, even when it was icy cold. And we’d find her standing there, crying her heart out.

  ‘ “Come
now, what’s wrong? Tell me.”

  ‘ “Nothing, Madame Moinel.”

  ‘And she would come back inside.

  ‘The neighbours used to say, “You’ve found a pretty little maid there, Madame Moinel.”

  ‘Even though we begged her not to, she wanted to carry on towards Paris when March came. I gave her some dresses that she altered to her size and Moinel bought her ticket at the station and gave her a little money.

  ‘She didn’t forget us. She’s a dressmaker in Paris near Notre-Dame. She still writes to us to ask whether we have any news from Les Sablonnières. To put that idea out of her head, I told her once and for all that the estate had been sold and pulled down, and that the young man had vanished for ever and that the girl was married. I think all that must be true. Since then my Valentine has been writing to us much less often.’

  It was not a ghost story that Aunt Moinel had told me in her shrill little voice that was so well suited to telling them. Even so, I was as uneasy as could be. The reason was that we had sworn to Frantz the gypsy to serve him like brothers, and now I had the opportunity to do so… But was this the moment to spoil the joy that I was going to bring Meaulnes the next morning by telling him what I had learnt? What was the sense of launching him on an utterly impossible quest? Certainly, we had the girl’s address, but where to start looking for the gypsy who was wandering the world? Let the mad look after their mad, I thought. Delouche and Boujardon had been right. What a lot of harm that romanticizing Frantz had done us! I decided to say nothing until I had seen Augustin Meaulnes married to Mademoiselle de Galais.

  Even when I had made up my mind, I still had a painful sense of foreboding – though I was quick to dispel this ridiculous idea.

  The candle had almost burnt down, and a mosquito was humming, but Aunt Moinel, leaning with her elbows on her knees and her head bowed under the velvet hood that she did not take off even to sleep, started her story again… From time to time, she looked up and examined me to see what I was thinking (and perhaps to make sure that I was not dropping off to sleep). Eventually, with my head on the pillow, I slyly closed my eyes, pretending to doze off…