The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  ‘I don’t know when he’ll come back,’ she said, quickly.

  Her eyes were begging, and I was careful not to allude to it again.

  I often went back to see her. I would often talk with her beside the fire in that low-ceilinged room, where night arrived sooner than elsewhere. She never talked about herself or her hidden sorrow, but also she never tired of hearing from me about the details of our life as schoolboys at Sainte-Agathe.

  She listened gravely, tenderly, with almost maternal interest, as I told her about our youthful trials and tribulations. She never seemed surprised, even at our most childish and most dangerous exploits. She had this attentive tenderness from Monsieur de Galais, and it had not been exhausted by the deplorable adventures of her brother. Her only regret about the past, I think, was that she had not been enough of a close friend for her brother to confide in, since he had not dared to say anything to her or to anyone else at the time of his great disaster, and had felt himself to be irretrievably lost. And, when I think about it, this was a heavy burden that the young woman had taken on – a perilous enterprise, supporting someone like her brother whose mind was full of extravagant fantasies, and an overwhelming one, when she was throwing in her lot with an adventurous heart like that of my friend Meaulnes…

  One day, she gave me the most touching, I might even say the most mysterious, proof of the faith that she had in her brother’s childish dreams and the effort that she put into him keeping at least some traces of the dream that he had inhabited until he was twenty.

  It was an April evening as desolate as one in late autumn. For nearly a month we had been enjoying a gentle, premature spring, and the young woman had gone back to taking the long walks that she loved, in the company of Monsieur de Galais. But on that day, as the old man felt tired and I was free, she asked me to go with her, despite the threat of rain. More than half a league from Les Sablonnières, as we were walking beside the pond, we were caught by a storm of rain and hail. We took refuge against the unending rainfall in a shelter where the wind chilled us as we stood next to one another, staring in silence at the dark landscape. I can see her, in her sweet, austerely simple dress, pale and anguished.

  ‘We must go back,’ she said. ‘We have been gone such a long time. Who knows what might have happened?’

  But to my surprise, when we were finally able to leave our shelter, instead of going back towards Les Sablonnières, she continued to go forward and asked me to follow. After walking for a long time, we reached a house that I did not know, standing alone beside a sunken lane that must have led towards Préveranges. It was a commonplace little house, with a slate roof, just like so many other ordinary houses in the region, except for its remoteness and isolation.

  Seeing Yvonne de Galais, you would have thought that the house belonged to us and that we had left it while we were away on a long journey. Leaning forward, she opened a little gate, and anxiously hurried to look over the lonely place. A large, grass-covered yard, where children must have come to play in the long, slow evenings of late winter, had been ravaged by the storm. There was a hoop lying in a puddle. In the little plots where the children had sown flowers and peas, the heavy rain had left only trails of white gravel. And finally, huddled against the step of one damp door, we found a whole brood of rain-soaked chicks. Most of them had died beneath the stiffened wings and ruffled feathers of the mother hen.

  The young woman stifled a cry at this piteous scene. She leant over and, without heeding the water or the mud, sorted the living chicks from the dead and put them in a fold of her coat. Then she unlocked the door, and we went into the house. Four doors opened on a narrow corridor, along which the wind howled. Yvonne de Galais opened the first one on our right and led me into a dark room in which, as my eyes adjusted to it, I managed to make out a large mirror and a little bed covered, in country style, with a red silk eiderdown. As for Yvonne, after briefly looking around the rest of the house, she came back with the ailing brood in a basket filled with down, which she cautiously pushed under the quilt. And while a lingering ray of sunlight, the first and last of the day, made our faces paler and made darker the coming of night, we stood there, chilled and uneasy in our minds, in that strange house!

  From time to time, she went to look in the feverish nest and took out another dead chick to prevent it from killing the others. And each time, we felt that something like a great wind through the broken windows of the loft, like the mysterious sorrow of unknown children, was silently mourning.

  ‘This was Frantz’s house,’ my companion told me at last, ‘when he was small. He wanted a house all to himself, far from everyone, where he could go and play, enjoy himself and live in when he felt like it. My father thought this such a funny and unusual whim that he did not refuse. And when he wanted to, on a Thursday or a Sunday, or whenever, Frantz would go off and live in his own house, like a grown-up. The children from the farms around came to play with him or help him with the housework or the gardening. What a wonderful game it was! And when evening came, he was not afraid to sleep here all alone. As for us, we admired him so much that we didn’t even think of worrying.

  ‘Now, for a long time, the house has been empty,’ she went on, sighing. ‘Monsieur de Galais, weighed down by age and grief, has never done anything to find Frantz or bring him back. What could he do, for that matter?

  ‘I come here quite often. The little peasants from hereabouts come and play in the courtyard as they would in the old days. I like to imagine that they are Frantz’s old friends, that he is still a child himself and that he will soon return with the fiancée he has chosen for himself.

  ‘The children know me well. I play with them. This brood of little chickens was ours…’

  It had taken the shower and this small-scale disaster for her to confide in me all that great, unspoken sorrow and her regret at losing her brother – so crazy, so charming and so much admired. I heard her without saying anything, my heart full of tears…

  When the doors and gate were shut, and the chicks put back in the wooden hutch behind the house, she sadly took my arm, and I led her home…

  Weeks and months went by. Time past! Lost happiness! She had been the fairy, the princess and the mysterious love of all our adolescence, and it fell to me, my friend having left us, to take her arm and say the words that would assuage her grief. Those days, those conversations in the evening after the class that I took in the hillside school of Saint-Benoist-des-Champs, those walks when the only thing that we needed to discuss was the one thing about which we had both decided to say nothing – what can I say now about all this? I remember nothing but the memory, already half erased, of a lovely face, grown thin, and of two eyes with lids slowly lowered as they looked at me, as if already wishing to see no world except the one inside.

  I remained her faithful friend – her companion in an unspoken vigil – for a whole spring and summer, the like of which will never come again. We went back many times, in the afternoons, to Frantz’s house. She opened the doors to air it, so that there would be no mould when the young couple returned. She took care of the semi-wild poultry in the farmyard. And on Thursdays or Sundays, we joined in the games of the little country children from the farms around, their cries and laughter in that isolated place adding to the solitude and emptiness of the little abandoned house.

  XI

  CONVERSATION IN THE RAIN

  August, holiday time, took me away from Les Sablonnières and Yvonne de Galais. I had to spend my two months’ holiday at Sainte-Agathe. I saw again the great dry yard, the shelter and the empty classroom… Meaulnes was everywhere, everything was filled with memories of our adolescence, now ended. In those long, yellowed days, I would shut myself up as I used to, before Meaulnes came, in the Archive Room or in the empty classrooms. I read, wrote and remembered… My father was away fishing, and Millie in the drawing room, sewing or playing the piano, as in the old days… And in the utter silence of the classroom where everything – the torn, green paper crowns
,16 the wrappings from prize books, the blackboards sponged clean – told you that the school year was over, the awards had been handed out, everything was turned towards autumn, the start of classes in October and renewed effort, the thought came to me that in the same way our youth was ended and happiness had passed us by, as I too was waiting for the start of term at Les Sablonnières and the return of Augustin… who perhaps might never return at all…

  However, there was one piece of good news that I gave Millie when she began to question me about the new bride. I was not expecting her questions: she had a way that was at once very innocent and very sly of suddenly plunging you into confusion by putting a finger on your most secret thoughts. I called a halt to it all by announcing that my friend Meaulnes’ young wife would become a mother in October.

  Inside myself, I recalled the day when Yvonne de Galais had intimated this great piece of news to me. There was a silence: a young man’s slight embarrassment on my part. And then, to dispel it, I blurted out (thinking too late of all the tragic events that I was stirring up with this remark), ‘You must be very happy.’

  But without any reservation, regret, remorse or bitterness, she gave a fine, contented smile and answered, ‘Yes, very happy.’

  During that last week of the holidays, which is generally the finest and most romantic, a week of great rainstorms, a week when you start to light the fires and that I would usually spend hunting among the black damp fir trees of Le Vieux-Nançay, I got ready to return directly to Saint-Benoist-des-Champs. Firmin, my Aunt Julie and my cousins at Le Vieux-Nançay would have asked me too many questions that I did not want to answer. This time, I abandoned the idea of spending a week living the intoxicating life of a hunter and returned to my schoolhouse four days before the new term began.

  I arrived before nightfall, crossing a courtyard that was already carpeted in yellow leaves. Once the carter had left, I sadly unpacked in the echoing, musty dining room the parcel of foodstuffs that my mother had packed for me. After snatching a hasty meal, impatiently, anxiously, I put on my cape and set off on a feverish walk that brought me right to the outskirts of Les Sablonnières.

  I did not want to intrude on the first evening after I arrived. But, bolder than I had been in February, after walking all round the house, where only the young woman’s bedroom window was lit, I went in through the garden gate at the back and sat down on a bench against the hedge in the gathering gloom, happy at simply being there, close to what absorbed and preoccupied me most of anything in the world.

  Night was coming. A light drizzle was starting to fall. With head bowed, lost in thought, I was watching my shoes shining as they gradually got wetter. The darkness was slowly enfolding me, and the chill of evening was overtaking me without disturbing my revery. I dreamed, tenderly and sadly, of the muddy paths of Sainte-Agathe on that same late September evening; I imagined the square full of mist, the butcher’s boy whistling on his way to the pump, the café lit up, the merry carriage full of people with its shell of open umbrellas arriving before the end of the holidays at Uncle Florentin’s… And I thought sadly, ‘What does all that happiness amount to, if Meaulnes, my friend, cannot be there, or his young wife?’

  It was then that, looking up, I saw her a few yards away from me. Her shoes were making a little noise in the sand, which I had mistaken for the drops of water dripping from the hedgerow. She had a large black woollen scarf over her head and shoulders, and her hair was flattened against her forehead and spattered with fine drops of rain. She must have seen me from her bedroom window, the one that overlooked the garden, and she came out to me. So, in the old days, my mother would get worried and come out to tell me, ‘It’s time to come indoors’; but she would take a liking to this walk through the rain and the night, and just say gently, ‘You’ll catch cold!’ then stay with me, talking for a long time.

  Yvonne de Galais offered me a burning hand and, giving up hope of getting me to go into Les Sablonnières, sat down on the bench, covered in moss and verdigris, while I stood, my knee resting on the same bench and leaning towards her to hear what she said.

  First of all, she scolded me in a friendly way for cutting short my holidays.

  ‘I had to come,’ I told her, ‘as soon as possible, to keep you company.’

  ‘It’s true, I’m still alone,’ she said, almost in a whisper, sighing. ‘Augustin is not back.’

  Taking the sigh for one of regret and a stifled reproach, I started to say, slowly, ‘So much folly in such a noble head. Perhaps the yearning for adventure, stronger than any other…’

  But she interrupted me. And it was there, that evening, for the first and last time, that she spoke to me of Meaulnes.

  ‘Don’t say that, François Seurel, my friend,’ she told me, gently. ‘Only we… Only I am at fault. Think what we did… We said to him, “Here’s happiness, this is what you have been searching for throughout your youth and here is the girl who was at the end of all your dreams!”

  ‘What else could he do, when we were pushing him by the shoulders in that way, except be seized with uncertainty, then dread, then terror? How could he do otherwise than give in to the temptation to escape?’

  ‘Yvonne,’ I said quietly. ‘You know very well that you were his happiness. You were that girl.’

  ‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘How could I for a moment have had such an arrogant thought? That thought was the whole trouble.

  ‘I told you, “Perhaps I can’t do anything for him.” But in my deepest self, I was thinking, “Since he searched so long for me and since I love him, I must make him happy.” But when I saw him next to me, with all his feverish unease and his mysterious sense of remorse, I realized that I was just a poor woman like the rest…

  ‘ “I am not worthy of you,” he kept saying as day broke at the end of our wedding night. I tried to console him, to reassure him, but nothing would calm his anxiety. So I said, “If you must go, if I have come to you at the moment when nothing could make you happy, if you have to abandon me for a while so that afterwards you can come back to me at peace, then I am the one asking you to go…”’

  In the dark, I saw that she was looking up at me. This was like a confession, and she was anxiously waiting for me to approve or condemn. But what could I say? Of course, in my mind, I saw The Great Meaulnes of earlier times, gauche and wild, who always preferred to be punished rather than to say he was sorry or to ask for permission, even when it would certainly have been granted. Of course, what Yvonne de Galais should have done was to attack him directly, to take his head in her hands and say, ‘Do I care what you have done? I love you. Aren’t all men sinners?’ Of course, she had been quite wrong – out of generosity, in a spirit of self-sacrifice – to send him off along the road to adventure… But how could I disapprove of so much goodness and love!

  There was a long silence, during which, deeply troubled, we heard the cold rain pouring off the hedges and under the branches of the trees.

  ‘So he left in the morning,’ she continued. ‘By then, there was nothing any more that separated us. He kissed me, simply, like a husband leaving his young wife before a long journey…’

  She stood up. I took her feverish hand in mine, then her arm, and we went back up the avenue in the dark of night.

  ‘And has he never even written to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Never,’ she replied.

  At that, the same thought came to both of us, about the adventurous life that he was leading at that very moment on the roads of France or Germany, and we started to speak about him as we had never done before. Forgotten details and old impressions came back to our minds as we slowly made our way back to the house, with long pauses at every step while we exchanged memories. For a long time, right up to the garden fence, I could hear her precious voice, sounding low in the darkness. And, seized by my old enthusiasm, I spoke continually to her, with deep affection, of the one who had abandoned us…

  XII

  THE BURDEN

  School was due to resume
on a Monday. On the Saturday evening, at around five o’clock, a woman from the Estate came to the school yard, where I was sawing some wood for the winter. She wanted to announce that a little girl had been born at Les Sablonnières. It had been a difficult birth, and at nine in the evening, the midwife had to be called from Préveranges. At midnight, the trap was sent again to call the doctor from Vierzon. He had to use forceps. The child’s head was hurt, and she was crying a lot, but she seemed healthy enough. Yvonne de Galais was now very weak but she had suffered and fought with extraordinary courage.

  I dropped my work and hurried to put on another jacket; pleased enough with the news, I went with the woman back to Les Sablonnières. Cautiously, for fear that one of the two patients might be sleeping, I climbed the narrow wooden staircase to the first floor. There, Monsieur de Galais, looking tired but happy, led me into the room where they had temporarily installed the cradle, surrounded by curtains.

  I had never before been into a house on the very day when a child was born there. How strange and mysterious and good it seemed to me! It was such a lovely evening – a real summer evening – that Monsieur de Galais had not hesitated to open the window overlooking the yard. Leaning beside me on the window ledge, exhausted but joyful, he described the drama of the night before; and as I listened to him I felt vaguely that some stranger was now in the room with us…

  Behind the curtains, she started to cry, a sharp, long, little cry; and Monsieur de Galais said softly to me, ‘It’s the wound on her head that makes her cry.’