The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

by Henri Alain-Fournier

  I am walking through the half-dark streets, with a weight on my heart. A drop of water falls: I am afraid that it will start to rain: a shower might stop her from coming. But the wind starts to blow again and, once more, the rain does not fall. Up in the grey afternoon of the sky – now grey, now radiant – a large cloud has had to succumb to the wind. And I am here, earthbound, miserably waiting.

  In front of the theatre. After quarter of an hour, I am sure that she will not come. From the embankment where I am standing, I am watching the lines of people walking across the bridge that she would have to take. My eyes follow all the young women in mourning that I see coming this way and I feel almost grateful to those who, for the longest time and closest to me, resemble her and keep my hopes alive…

  An hour of waiting. I am weary. At nightfall, a police officer drags a young tearaway off to the nearby police station while the lad is cursing him in a strangled voice with all the insults and filth that he can muster… The policeman is furious, pale and silent… As soon as he gets him inside, he starts to hit him, then closes the door on them so that he can beat him at his leisure… The dreadful thought occurs to me that I have given up paradise and am now standing at the gates of hell.

  Tired of waiting, I leave the place and go to the low, narrow street between the Seine and Notre-Dame which I know is roughly the place where she lives. All alone, I walk up and down. From time to time, a maid or a housewife comes out under the drizzling rain to do her shopping before nightfall. There is nothing here for me, and I leave. Once again, I go past the square where we were due to meet, under the clear rain that is holding back the dark. There are more people than earlier – a black crowd…

  Suppositions. Despair. Weariness. I cling to the idea of tomorrow. Tomorrow at the same time at this same spot I will come back and wait. And I am in a hurry to get to tomorrow. I imagine the boredom of this evening, then tomorrow morning, which I have to spend in idleness. But is today not almost over? Back home, beside the fire, I can hear them selling the evening papers. No doubt in her house, lost somewhere in the city, near Notre-Dame, she can hear them too.

  She… I mean: Valentine.

  This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I – who have lost my day – what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?

  Friday evening. I thought I would write after that: ‘I did not see her again’. And it would all be over.

  But this evening at four o’clock, when I get to the corner by the theatre, there she is. Delicate and solemn, dressed in black, but with a powdered face and a collar that made her look like a guilty Pierrot – at the same time sad and mischievous.

  She has come to tell me that she wants to leave me at once and will not come again.

  Yet when night falls, here we are still, the two of us, walking slowly beside one another on the gravelled paths of the Tuileries Gardens. She is telling me her story, but in such a convoluted way that I cannot fully understand it. She says ‘my love’, talking about the fiancé whom she never married. She does it deliberately, I think, to shock me and so that I will not become attached to her.

  There are some things that she says that I am reluctant to put down:

  ‘Don’t trust me,’ she says. ‘I’ve always done silly things.

  ‘I roamed the highways, all alone.

  ‘I drove my fiancé to desperation. I abandoned him because he admired me too much. He could only see me in his imagination and not as I was. And I am full of faults. We should have been very unhappy.’

  I am constantly catching her out at making herself seem worse than she is. I think that she wants to prove to herself that she was right before in doing the silly thing that she mentions, that she has no cause for regret and that she was not worthy of the happiness that she might have enjoyed.

  ‘What I like about you,’ she said another time, staring hard at me.

  ‘What I like about you, I don’t know why, are my memories…’

  ‘I still love him,’ she told me, yet another time. ‘More than you think.’

  Then, suddenly, brusquely, brutally, sadly: ‘What do you want, in the end? Do you love me, too? Are you, too, going to ask for my hand?’

  I stammered something. I don’t know what I replied. I may have said, ‘Yes.’

  *

  This rough diary was interrupted at this point. What followed were rough copies of unreadable, shapeless letters, with many crossings out. What a precarious engagement! At Meaulnes’ request, the girl had left her job, while he took charge of the preparations for the wedding. But he was constantly haunted by the desire to look further, to set out again on the trail of his lost love, and several times he must surely have disappeared. In the letters, with tragic chagrin, he tries to justify himself to Valentine.

  XV

  THE SECRET

  (continued)

  Then the diary resumed.

  He had put down his memories of a stay that the two of them made in the country, I don’t know where. The odd thing is that from here on, perhaps because of some secret feeling of embarrassment, the diary was written in such a disconnected and formless way, and scribbled so hastily, that I have had to go over and reconstitute this part of his story myself.

  14 June. When he woke up early in the room in the inn, the sun was lighting the red pattern on the black curtain. Some farm workers in the room below were talking loudly as they took their morning coffee, with rough, but unimpassioned complaints about one of their bosses. Meaulnes must have been hearing this steady noise in his sleep for a long time, because at first he was not aware of it. The curtain, dappled with red clusters by the sunlight, these morning voices rising up into the silent room, everything mingled to give a feeling of waking up in the country at the start of some delightful summer holidays.

  He got up and gently knocked on the room next door. There was no reply, so he silently opened it. This was when he saw Valentine and understood where her tranquil contentment came from. She was sleeping, quite motionless and silent, so that you couldn’t hear the sound of her breathing, as birds must sleep. He stared for a long time at this child’s face with its closed eyes, this face so calm that one would have wished never to wake or disturb it.

  The only movement that she made to show that she was no longer asleep was to open her eyes and look.

  As soon as she was dressed, Meaulnes came over to the girl.

  ‘We’re late,’ she said.

  At once, she was like a housewife in her home.

  She tidied the rooms and brushed the clothes that Meaulnes had worn on the previous day; when she got to the trousers, she was in despair. The bottoms of the legs were coated in thick mud. She paused, then, carefully, before brushing them, began by scraping off the first layer of earth with a knife.

  ‘That’s how the kids at Sainte-Agathe did it,’ Meaulnes said, ‘when they’d fallen in the mud.’

  ‘My mother taught me,’ said Valentine.

  This was the companion that Meaulnes, the hunter and peasant, must have wished for before his mysterious adventure.

  15 June. At dinner in the farm where, thanks to some friends who had introduced them as husband and wife, they had been invited – much to their annoyance – they behaved as shyly as a newly married couple.

  The candles had been lit in two candelabra, one at each end of the table covered in a white cloth, as for a quiet country wedding. As soon as anyone leant forward under this dim light, their face was plunged into shadow.

  To the right of Patrice, the farmer’s son, there was Valentine, then Meaulnes, who
stayed taciturn throughout the meal, though he was almost always the one addressed. Since he had decided in this remote village to pass Valentine off as his wife, in order to avoid gossip, he had been riven by regret and remorse. And while Patrice, in the manner of a country gentleman, was playing host, Meaulnes was thinking, ‘I am the one who should this evening, in a low room like this one, a fine room that I know well, be presiding over my wedding feast.’

  Valentine, beside him, shyly refused whatever she was offered. She was like a young peasant girl. At each new offer, she looked at her friend and seemed to want him to shelter her. For a long time, Patrice had been urging her in vain to empty her glass, when finally Meaulnes leant towards her and said softly, ‘You must drink, my little Valentine.’

  So, docilely, she drank. And Patrice smiled and congratulated the young man on having such an obedient wife.

  But both of them, Valentine and Meaulnes, stayed silent and thoughtful. They were tired, first of all. Their feet, soaked by the mud of their walk, felt chilled against the washed tiles of the kitchen floor. And then, from time to time, the young man had to say, ‘My wife, Valentine. My wife…’

  And each time, as he quietly said that word in front of these unknown country people, in this dark dining room, he had the impression that he was committing a sin.

  17 June. The afternoon of the last day started badly.

  Patrice and his wife accompanied them on their walk. Little by little, on the uneven hillside covered with heather, the two couples became separated. Meaulnes and Valentine sat down among the juniper trees in a small thicket.

  Drops of rain were carried on the wind and the sky was low. The evening had a bitter taste, it seemed, the taste of such boredom that even love could not dispel it.

  For a long time they stayed there, in their hiding place, sheltered by the branches and saying very little. Then the weather improved, and the sun came out. They felt that from now on, all would be well.

  They started to speak about love, and Valentine talked on and on…

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘That’s what my fiancé promised me, like the child that he was: straightaway we should have had a house, like a cottage, far away in the country. It was all ready for us, he said. We should have come there as though we were returning from a long journey, on the evening of our marriage, around the time that is close to nightfall. And along the roads, in the courtyard, hidden in the bushes, strange children would have cheered us on, shouting, “Long live the bride!” What madness, isn’t it?’

  Meaulnes listened to her uneasily, saying nothing. In all this, he felt something like the echo of a voice already heard. And, also, as the young woman told this story, there was something like a faint note of regret in her voice.

  But she was afraid she had upset him. She turned round towards him, gently, impulsively, saying, ‘I want to give you everything I have, something that is more precious than anything else to me – and you can burn it!’

  Then, staring at him anxiously, she took a small packet of letters out of her pocket and held them out to him: her fiancé’s letters.

  Oh, he recognized the fine writing at once. Why hadn’t he realized it earlier? It was the writing of Frantz, the gypsy, which he had seen previously on the desperate note left behind in the room at the château…

  By now, they were walking along a little narrow road past fields of daisies and hay lit obliquely by the rays of the five o’clock sun. So great was his amazement that Meaulnes did not yet understand what a disaster all this meant for him. He read the letters because she asked him to read them: childish, sentimental, pathetic phrases… This, in the final letter:

  Ah, so you have lost the little heart, my unforgiveable little Valentine! What will become of us? Although, after all, I am not superstitious…

  Meaulnes read, half blinded by regret and anger, his face unmoving, but quite pale, twitching slightly under the eyes. Valentine, troubled at seeing him like that, looked to see where he had got to and what was annoying him so much…

  ‘It’s a piece of jewellery,’ she explained hastily. ‘He gave it to me and made me swear to keep it always. That was one of his crazy ideas.’

  But this only made Meaulnes more exasperated.

  ‘Crazy!’ he said, putting the letters in his pocket. ‘Why keep repeating that word? Why did you never want to believe in him? I knew him: he was the most wonderful boy in the world!’

  ‘You knew him?’ she said, completely overcome. ‘You knew Frantz de Galais?’

  ‘He was my best friend, my brother in adventures – and now I’ve taken his fiancée from him!

  ‘Oh, how you harmed us,’ he continued, furiously. ‘You, who never believed in anything. You are the cause of it all. You are the one who ruined everything – ruined it!’

  She tried to speak, to take his hand, but he pushed her away roughly.

  ‘Go away. Leave me.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said, her face burning, stammering and half weeping, ‘if that’s how it is, I shall leave. I’ll go back to Bourges, go home, with my sister. And if you don’t come to look for me, you realize, don’t you, that my father is too poor to keep me. Well, I’ll come back to Paris, I’ll walk the roads as I did once before and certainly become a lost woman, since I don’t have a trade.’

  She went off to get her parcels and take the train, while Meaulnes, without even looking at her as she left, continued to walk along aimlessly.

  The diary was once again interrupted at this point.

  After that there were more rough copies of letters – the letters of a man who was lost and undecided. Returning to La Ferté-d’Angillon, Meaulnes wrote to Valentine, apparently to confirm that he had resolved not to see her again and to tell her exactly why, but perhaps in reality so that she would reply to him. In one of these letters, he asked her something that, in the confusion of the moment, it had not at first occurred to him to ask her: did she know where the long-lost Estate was to be found? In another, he begged her to be reconciled with Frantz de Galais. He would make it his business to find him for her… None of the letters that I saw in this rough form had been sent, but he must have written twice or three times without getting a reply. For him, this had been a period of conflict, frightful and miserable, in total solitude. The hope of ever seeing Yvonne de Galais again had completely faded, and he must have felt his great resolve weaken bit by bit. And, judging by the pages that follow – the last in his diary – I guess that he must one fine morning at the start of the holidays have hired a bicycle to go to Bourges and visit the cathedral.

  He had left at first light, down the beautiful, straight road through the woods, on the way inventing a thousand excuses for presenting himself in a dignified manner, without asking for a reconciliation, to the woman whom he had rejected.

  The last four pages, that I have managed to reconstruct, describe this journey and his final error.

  XVI

  THE SECRET

  (end)

  25 August. On the other side of Bourges, at the edge of the new suburbs, he found Valentine Blondeau’s house, after a long search. A woman, Valentine’s mother, seemed to be waiting for him on the doorstep. She was a good, housewifely figure, heavy, worn, but still attractive. She watched him curiously as he approached, and when he asked if the Mademoiselles Blondeau were there, she gently explained to him, in a considerate tone, that they had returned to Paris on 15 August.

  ‘They told me not to say where they were going,’ she added. ‘But if you write to their old address, the letters will be sent on to them.’

  Retracing his steps, wheeling his bicycle beside him through the little front garden, he thought, ‘She has left… Everything turned out as I willed it… I forced her to do this…“I shall certainly become a fallen woman,” she said. And I drove her to that! I’m the one who ruined Frantz’s fiancée!’

  And under his breath he repeated, insanely, ‘All the better, all the better!’ – but with the certainty that, on the contrary, it was really
‘all the worse’ and that, with this woman watching, he would trip up before he got to the gate and fall on his knees.

  He did not think of having lunch and stopped in a café where he wrote a long letter to Valentine, just to cry out – to release the desperate cry that was stifling him. His letter said over and over: ‘How could you? How could you? How could you do that? How could you ruin yourself?’

  There were some officers drinking close by. One of them was noisily telling a story about a woman, snatches of which you could hear: ‘I told her… You ought to know me… I play cards with your husband every evening!’ The others laughed, turning their heads and spitting behind the benches. Haggard and covered in dust, Meaulnes watched them like a beggar; he could imagine them with Valentine on their knees.

  For a long time he rode his bicycle around the cathedral, vaguely thinking, ‘After all, it was to see the cathedral that I came.’ At the end of every street, on its deserted square, it rose up, vast and indifferent. The streets were narrow and dirty like the streets around a village church. Here and there, he saw the sign of a brothel, a red lantern… Meaulnes felt that his grief was lost in the dirt and vice of this district which had gathered, as in former times, under the flying buttresses of the cathedral. He felt a peasant’s fear, a revulsion at this town church in which the secret corners have the sculpted images of every vice, a church built among brothels and offering no cure for the purest pains of love.

  Two street women went past, holding one another by the waist and looking brazenly at him. From disgust, or in jest, either to be revenged on his love or to destroy it, Meaulnes followed them slowly on his bicycle and one of them, a sad-looking creature whose sparse blonde hair was pulled back into a false chignon, gave him a rendezvous for six o’clock in the garden of the Archbishopric – the garden where Frantz, in one of his letters, had made an appointment to meet poor Valentine.