The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  ‘It’s coming from the large fir grove to the left,’ I said in an undertone. ‘It must be a poacher.’

  Jasmin shook his head. ‘You know very well that it isn’t,’ he said.

  Then, lower: ‘They’re both here, in the village, they’ve been here since this morning. I caught Ganache at eleven o’clock keeping watch in a field near the chapel. He took off as soon as he saw me. They may have come a long way by bicycle, because he was covered in mud halfway up his back.’

  ‘But what do they want?’

  ‘I don’t know. One thing’s sure; we’ve got to chase them off. They can’t be allowed to loiter around here. Or else all the madness will start again.’

  I agreed, though I didn’t say so.

  ‘I think the best would be to go and find them,’ I said. ‘To see what they want and get them to see sense…’

  So we bent down and, slowly, silently, we crept through the undergrowth as far as the large fir grove from which, at regular intervals, the long call was coming. In itself, it was no sadder than anything else, but to both of us it seemed to bode nothing but ill.

  In this part of the fir wood, where the trees are planted in regular rows and the eye has a straight line between the trunks, it is hard to take anyone by surprise or to go forward without being seen. We did not even try. I stationed myself at one corner of the wood, and Jasmin went to the diagonally opposite one, so that together we could each see two sides of the rectangle from outside and no gypsy could leave the wood without us calling to him. Once we had taken up our posts, I started to play my part as a peaceful negotiator and shouted, ‘Frantz!… Frantz! Don’t worry. It’s me, Seurel. I want to talk to you…’

  There was a moment’s silence. I was about to shout again when, from the very heart of the wood, just beyond where I could see clearly, a voice ordered, ‘Stay where you are. He’s coming out to you.’

  Bit by bit, through the tall fir trees, which from a distance seemed bunched together, I could make out the form of the young man coming towards me. He seemed to be badly dressed and covered in mud. He had bicycle clips around the bottom of his trousers and an old yachting cap planted on his long hair. Now, I could see his face. It was thinner, and he seemed to have been crying…

  Striding boldly across to me, he asked: ‘What do you want?’ in an insolent tone of voice.

  ‘What about you, Frantz? What are you doing here? Why have you come to disturb people who are happy? Tell me: what is it that you want?’

  He blushed at this direct question, stammered, then replied simply, ‘I’m unhappy, I’m so unhappy…’

  After that, with his head in his hands and leaning against the trunk of a tree, he started to sob bitterly. We took a few steps into the wood. The place was absolutely quiet, without even the sound of the wind, which was blocked by the tall firs at the edge. The muffled sound of the young man’s sobs echoed and faded through the regularly spaced trunks of the trees. I waited for the crisis to pass, then put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Frantz, come with me. I’ll take you to them. They will welcome you like a child that has been lost and found, and it will all be over.’

  But he did not want to listen. In a voice deadened by crying, miserable, obstinate and angry, he went on, ‘So Meaulnes doesn’t care about me any more? Why doesn’t he answer when I call him? Why hasn’t he kept his promise?’

  ‘Come on, Frantz,’ I said. ‘The time for childish make-believe is over. Don’t let some folly spoil the happiness of those you love, your sister and Augustin Meaulnes.’

  ‘But he alone can save me, as well you know. Only he is able to find the trail I’ve lost. For almost three years, Ganache and I have been hunting all over France, to no avail. Your friend was the only one I still trusted. And now he’s not answering any more. He has found his love. So why doesn’t he think of me, now? He has to get started on his way: Yvonne will let him go. She has never refused me anything.’

  He turned towards me a face on which his tears had drawn dirty furrows through the dust and mud, the face of an exhausted, defeated old child. There were freckles around his eyes, his chin was badly shaved and his overgrown hair was hanging down on to his dirty collar. He was shivering, with his hands in his pockets. This was no longer the princely child in rags of former times. In heart, no doubt, he was more a child than ever: imperious, capricious and easily discouraged. But such childishness was painful in a boy who was already showing signs of age. At one time, he possessed such arrogant youth that it seemed he could get away with any folly that he liked. Now, you were more likely to feel sorry for him, because he had failed in life, and then to resent the fact that he evidently persisted in playing this ridiculous part of the young romantic hero. And finally, despite myself, it occurred to me that our fine Frantz, with his exalted loves, must have been reduced to stealing to survive, just like his friend Ganache… All that pride had come to this!

  ‘Suppose I promise,’ I said at last, after thinking about it, ‘that in a few days Meaulnes will join your quest, just for you?’

  ‘He will succeed, won’t he? You’re sure?’ he asked, his teeth chattering.

  ‘I think he will. Everything is possible with him!’

  ‘How will I know? Who will tell me?’

  ‘Come back here exactly a year from now, at the same time. You will find the girl that you love.’

  As I said this, I was not thinking of bothering the newly wed couple, but of making inquiries from Aunt Moinel and doing my best to find the girl myself.

  The gypsy was looking me directly in the eye with a truly admirable urge to believe. Fifteen! After all, he was still only fifteen – the age that we all had been in Sainte-Agathe on the evening when they swept the classroom out and the three of us swore that terrible, childish oath.

  He found himself obliged to say, ‘Very well, we’ll leave’, and a wave of despair flooded over him again.

  It must have been with great sorrow that he gazed at all the woods around us, having to leave them behind once more.

  ‘In three days,’ he said, ‘we’ll be on the road to Germany. We left our vehicles some way off; we have been walking constantly for the past thirty hours. We thought that we would arrive in time before the wedding to take Meaulnes and look for my fiancée, as he looked for the Estate of Les Sablonnières.’

  Then, giving way once more to his dreadful childishness, he said, ‘Call your Delouche, because there would be trouble if I met him.’

  Slowly I saw his grey form vanish among the trees. I called Jasmin and we went back to our watch. But almost at once, we saw Augustin in the house, closing the shutters, and we were struck by how odd he looked.

  IX

  THE HAPPY PEOPLE

  Later, I would learn in the minutest detail what had happened there.

  From early afternoon, in the drawing room at Les Sablonnières, Meaulnes and his wife, whom I still call Mademoiselle de Galais, were left completely alone. Once the guests had gone, Monsieur de Galais opened the door and, for a second, allowed the high wind, howling, to come into the house; then he set out towards Le Vieux-Nançay, not to return until dinner time, when he would lock everything up and give orders to the workers on the farm. From then on, no noise reached the young people from outside. There was just one leafless branch of a rosebush brushing against the window pane facing the moors. Like two passengers in a drifting boat, in the strong winter wind, the two lovers were enclosed with their happiness.

  ‘The fire looks as if it’s going out,’ said Mademoiselle de Galais, getting up to take a log from the chest. But Meaulnes hurried forward and put the wood on the fire himself.

  Then he took the girl’s outstretched hand and they stood there opposite one another, as though choked by some great, unutterable piece of news.

  The wind was blowing past with the sound of a flooding river, and from time to time a drop of water would streak across the window, diagonally, like rain on the window of a railway carriage.

  Then the girl ran off.
She opened the door to the corridor and vanished with a mysterious smile. For a moment, Augustin was left alone in the half-dark… The ticking of a small clock recalled the dining room at Sainte-Agathe… He must have thought, ‘So this is the house I have been looking for, for so long, the corridor that was once so full of whispers and strange comings and goings…’

  It was at that moment that he must have heard – Mademoiselle de Galais would later tell me that she heard it too – Frantz’s first call, close to the house.

  After that, though the young woman showed him all the wonderful things she had brought – her childhood toys and all the photographs of her as a child: dressed up in a uniform, herself and Frantz on their mother’s knee (their mother who was so pretty…), and then all the remaining prim little dresses that she used to wear, ‘right down to the one that I was wearing, you see, around the time when you were soon about to meet me, when you were just coming to the school at Sainte-Agathe, I think…’ – Meaulnes neither saw nor heard anything.

  Yet for a moment he seemed to have reverted to the idea of his extraordinary, unimaginable good fortune: ‘You are there,’ he said, in an expressionless voice, as though just to say it made him dizzy. ‘You really are just passing by the table and your hand rests on it for a moment…’

  And again: ‘My mother, when she was young, used to lean forward slightly like that to speak to me… And when she sat down at the piano…’

  At this, Yvonne de Galais suggested that she should play something before nightfall. But it was dark in that corner of the drawing room, and they had to light a candle. The pink shade, reflecting on the young woman’s face, heightened the redness on her cheeks, the sign of deep anxiety.

  Over at the edge of the wood, I started to hear the tremulous music carried on the wind, soon interrupted by a second shout from the two madmen who had come towards us through the trees.

  Meaulnes stayed for a long time listening to the young woman play and silently staring through a window. He turned several times to look at the gentle face, so vulnerable and full of unease. Then he went over to Yvonne and very softly put his hand on her shoulder. She felt the soft weight of the hand on her neck and felt sure she ought to know how to respond to its caress.

  ‘It’s getting dark,’ he said, at length. ‘I’m going to close the shutters. But don’t stop playing…’

  What was going on in the mysterious wildness of his heart? I have often wondered and only understood when it was too late. Some buried remorse? Some inexplicable regret? Or was it the fear of seeing this unexpected happiness that he was holding so tightly soon slip between his fingers? And in that case was there some dreadful urge to cast away this marvel that he had gained, at once and for ever?

  He went out slowly, silently, after looking one more time at his young wife. From the wood’s edge we saw him firstly close one shutter, hesitantly, then look vaguely in our direction, close another, then suddenly run as fast as he could towards us. He came near before it occurred to us to make ourselves less conspicuous. He saw us as he was about to cross a low, recently planted hedge marking the edge of a field. He swerved. I remember his crazed manner and how he looked – like a hunted animal. He seemed to be turning back to cross the hedge near to the little stream.

  I called out to him, ‘Meaulnes! Augustin!’

  But he did not even turn round. Then, convinced that this was the only way to hold him back, I shouted, ‘Frantz is here! Stop!’

  And at last he did stop. Panting, not giving me a chance to think what I was going to say, he said, ‘He’s there? What does he want of me?’

  ‘He’s unhappy,’ I answered. ‘He came to ask for your help in his quest for what he has lost.’

  ‘Ah!’ he said, lowering his head. ‘I guessed as much. I tried as hard as I could to forget that idea… But where is he? Tell me quickly.’

  I said that Frantz had just left, and that we would surely not be able to catch up with him now. This was a great disappointment for Meaulnes. He hesitated, took a step or two, then stopped. He appeared to be in the depths of uncertainty and woe. I told him what I had promised the young man in his name. I said that I had made an appointment with him in the same place a year from then.

  Augustin, usually so calm, was now in a state of extraordinary nervousness and impatience.

  ‘Ah, why did you do that?’ he said. ‘Yes, yes, no doubt I can save him. But it has to be at once. I have to see him, to speak to him, so that he can forgive me and I can make it up to him… Otherwise, I shall not be able to go back there…’

  And he turned towards Les Sablonnières.

  ‘In other words,’ I said, ‘for the sake of some childish promise that you made to him, you are destroying your happiness.’

  ‘Oh, if that promise were the only thing,’ he said.

  And thus is was that I learnt that there was some other bond between the two young men, though I could not guess what it was.

  ‘In any case,’ I said, ‘it’s too late to run. They’re now on their way to Germany.’

  He was about to reply, when a dishevelled, wild-eyed figure appeared between us. It was Mademoiselle de Galais. She must have been running because her face was bathed in sweat. She must have fallen and hurt herself, because her forehead was scratched above the right eye, and there was dried blood in her hair.

  In some of the poor districts of Paris, I have sometimes seen a couple bursting out into the street and kept apart by some police who have intervened in their quarrel – a couple who were thought up to then to be happy, united and decent. The outburst came suddenly, at no particular moment, when they were sitting down to eat, one Sunday before going out or just as they were celebrating their little son’s birthday… And now everything is forgotten and broken apart. The man and woman in the midst of this chaos are now just two pitiful demons, and the tearful children cling to them, hugging them tightly and begging them to be quiet and to stop fighting.

  When Mademoiselle de Galais came up to Meaulnes, she reminded me of those children, of one of those poor frightened children. I think that if all her friends, a whole village, a whole world had been looking at her, she would have run up even so and fallen down in the same way, dishevelled, weeping and mud-stained.

  But when she realized that Meaulnes was there and that this time, at least, he would not abandon her, she put her arm in his and then could not help laughing through her tears like a little child. Neither one of them said a word. But since she had taken out her handkerchief, Meaulnes gently took it from her hands and, carefully and methodically, wiped the blood from the young girl’s hair.

  ‘We must go back now,’ he said.

  And I let them both go back, with the fine high wind of the winter evening lashing their faces – he reaching out his hand to help her over the rough ground, and she smiling and hastening with him towards the home that they had momentarily abandoned.

  X

  ‘FRANTZ’S HOUSE’

  Full of misgivings and vague anxieties that the fortunate outcome of the previous day’s turmoil was unable to dispel, I had to stay inside at school throughout the following day. As soon as the study period following the evening lesson arrived, I set out for Les Sablonnières. Night was falling when I reached the line of fir trees leading to the house. All the shutters were already closed. I was afraid that I would not be welcome at this late hour, on the day after a wedding. I stayed for a long time, wandering up and down on the outskirts of the garden and the surrounding fields, always hoping that I would see someone come out of the closed house. But my hopes were not realized. Even in the adjoining farm, nothing moved; so I had to go back home, with the darkest fears haunting my imagination.

  There were the same worries on the following day, a Saturday. In the evening, I hastily took my cloak and stick, with a piece of bread to eat on my way, and I reached Les Sablonnières when night was already falling to find everything as it had been on the previous day. There was a glimmer of light on the first floor, but no sound or move
ment… However, this time, from the courtyard of the farm, I could see the farmhouse door open, with a fire lit in the great kitchen, and I could hear the sound of voices and footsteps that one might expect at supper time. I was reassured by this, but not better informed. I couldn’t say or ask anything of these people. So back I went again to watch and wait, in vain, still hoping that I would see the door open and Augustin’s tall figure emerge at last.

  It was only on Sunday, in the afternoon, that I resolved to ring the doorbell of Les Sablonnières. While I was climbing the bare hillsides, I could hear the bells ringing in the distance for winter Vespers. I felt lonely and abandoned. A sad but indefinable foreboding overcame me. I was only half surprised when, after I had rung the bell, Monsieur de Galais came to the door by himself, to whisper to me that Yvonne de Galais was in bed, with a high temperature, and that Meaulnes had had to leave that Friday morning on a long journey. They did not know when he would return…

  Since the old man was very awkward and sad, and did not invite me inside, I left straightaway. As the door closed, I stood for a moment on the steps, with a heavy heart, utterly confused, watching – I don’t know why – a melancholy, dry wisteria branch swaying in a ray of sunlight.

  So the secret regret that Meaulnes had been harbouring since his trip to Paris had proved too strong, and eventually my friend had fled the tight embrace of happiness…

  Every Thursday and Sunday, I came to ask for news of Yvonne de Galais, until the evening when, finally convalescing, she asked for me to be invited in. I found her sitting by the fire in the drawing room with its large window overlooking the fields and woods. She was not pale, as I had imagined she would be, but on the contrary feverish, with bright red patches under her eyes and in an extremely nervous state. Although she still appeared very weak, she was dressed as though to go out. She said little, but enunciated every sentence with extraordinary emphasis, as though trying to persuade herself that her happiness had not yet faded… I can’t remember what we said, only that I eventually got round to asking, hesitantly, when Meaulnes would return.