The Lost Estate (18 page)

This is how it was with Jasmin Delouche. He stayed on at school – I don’t know why, though it was certainly without any wish to take exams – in the Cours supérieur, though everyone would like to have seen him give up. Meanwhile, he was learning the trade of plasterer with his Uncle Dumas. And soon this same Jasmin Delouche, with Boujardon and another very gentle boy, the son of the deputy mayor, called Denis, were the only older boys I liked to be with, because they dated from ‘Meaulnes’ time’.

In any case, Delouche had a quite sincere desire to be friends with me. The truth was that, having been the enemy of The Great Meaulnes, he would have liked to be the Meaulnes of the school himself: at the least, he may have regretted not being his second-in-command. He was less thick than Boujardon and I think he had realized all the extraordinary things that Meaulnes had brought to our lives. Often I would hear him saying, ‘The
Great Meaulnes used to say…’ or else, ‘Ah, that’s what The Great Meaulnes said…’

Apart from the fact that Jasmin was more grown-up than we were, the little chap had a store of curiosities that established his superiority over us: a mongrel dog with long white hair who answered to the annoying name of Bécali and brought back stones when you threw them for him, though he had no distinct aptitude for any sport; an old second-hand bicycle on which Jasmin would sometimes let us ride in the evening after school, but on which he preferred to exercise the village girls; and finally – and most of all – a blind white donkey that could be harnessed to any vehicle.

The donkey belonged to Dumas, but he lent it to Jasmin in summer, when we went to bathe in the Cher. On such occasions, his mother would give us a bottle of lemonade, which we put under the seat among the dry bathing trunks. And off we would go, eight or ten big boys from the school, together with Monsieur Seurel, some on foot, the rest clambering into the donkey cart, which we would then leave on the farm of Grand’Fons at the point where the path to the Cher became too steep.

I have reason to recall one excursion of this kind in minute detail. Jasmin’s donkey carried our bathing trunks, our clutter, the lemonade and Monsieur Seurel down to the Cher while we followed behind on foot. It was August, and we had just taken our exams. Now that we no longer had them hanging over us, we felt that the whole summer and all its happiness belonged to us and walked along the road singing whatever came into our heads at the start of a fine Thursday afternoon.

This innocent picture was clouded on the outward journey by just one thing: we saw Gilberte Poquelin walking ahead of us. She had a tightly belted waist, a mid-length skirt and the sweet, impudent look of a young girl on the way to becoming a young woman. She left the road and took a side-path, probably to fetch milk. Little Coffin immediately suggested to Jasmin that they follow her.

‘It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve kissed her,’ said Jasmin.

And he started to tell various salacious stories about her and
her friends, while the whole band of us, out of bravado, set off down the path, leaving Monsieur Seurel to carry on along the road in the donkey cart. However, once we were there, the band started to split up, and even Delouche seemed rather uninclined to accost the girl in front of us and did not approach her closer than fifty metres. There were some cock crows, hen clucks and wolf whistles, then we headed back, slightly embarrassed, giving up the chase. On the road, we had to run, under the bright sunshine. We were not singing any more.

We got changed among the dry reedbeds beside the Cher, the reeds shielding us from prying eyes, but not from the sun. With our feet in the sand and the dried mud, we could think of nothing except the bottle of Widow Delouche’s lemonade which was keeping cool in the spring of Grand’Fons, which forms a pool in the bank of the river. At the bottom of it you could always see some blue-green water weeds and two or three creatures like woodlice, but the water was so clear and transparent that fishermen would readily come there and kneel down, with a hand on each bank, to drink from it.

Alas, it was the same that day as on previous occasions! When we had got dressed and were sitting in a circle on the ground with our legs crossed so that we could share the cooled lemonade in two large tumblers, all that was left for each of us after Monsieur Seurel had been invited to take his share was a little froth which tickled the back of your throat and only served to make you more thirsty. So one after another we went to the pool (which we had originally scorned) and slowly brought our faces close to the surface of the pure water. But not everyone was used to these peasant manners. Several of us, including myself, did not manage to get a drink, some because they did not like water, others because their throats were too clenched through fear of swallowing a woodlouse, and still others who, deceived by the great transparency of the still water, were not able to judge precisely where the surface was and bathed half their faces at the same time as their mouths, and as a result breathed in what seemed like burning water through their noses, and some, finally, for all these reasons at once… No matter! To us, on these dried-out banks of the Cher, it seemed that all
the coolness of the earth was contained in that place. And even now, whenever and wherever I hear the word ‘spring’, that is the one that lingers in my mind.

We returned at dusk, at first with the same carefree spirits as when we had set out. The Chemin de Grand’Fons, which led up to the road, was a stream in winter and, in summer, a near-impassable gully broken up with holes and large roots, overshadowed as it made its way upward by tall rows of trees. One group of bathers went up it, just to show they could. The rest of us, with Monsieur Seurel, Jasmin and several of our friends, chose a gentler, sandy path, parallel to the other, alongside a neighbouring field. We could hear the other boys talking and laughing near by, below us and invisible in the darkness, while Delouche told his grown-up stories… At the top of the tall row of trees, evening insects were humming: we could see them, against the clear light of the sky, flying all around the lacy foliage. Sometimes one of them would suddenly drop and its hum would become a harsh buzz. A fine, calm summer evening! And our return – without hope, but without longing – from an unremarkable country outing… It was Jasmin, again, who unwittingly managed to upset this tranquillity…

Just as we arrived at the top of the hill, at the place where there are two massive old stones which are said to be the remains of a castle, he started to talk about estates he had visited, and particularly about a half-abandoned estate near Le Vieux-Nançay, called Le Domaine des Sablonnières. In his Allier accent, which boastfully rounds out some words, while affectedly clipping short others, he told how a few years before he had seen in the ruined chapel of this old country estate a tombstone on which the following words were carved:

Here lies the knight Galois

Faithful to his God, his King and his Lady

‘Ah, why! Huh!’ said Monsieur Seurel, shrugging his shoulders a little, and feeling slightly embarrassed at the direction the conversation was taking, while still wanting to let us talk like men.

So Jasmin went on to describe the château, as though he had spent his whole life there.

Several times on the way back from Le Vieux-Nançay, Dumas and he had been intrigued by the sight of an old grey turret rising above the fir trees. There was a whole maze of ruined buildings there in the middle of the woods which you could go round since no one lived in them. One day, the guardian of the place, to whom they had given a lift in their cart, had taken them to this strange estate. But since then, everything had been pulled down and, apparently, all that was left was the farm and a little summerhouse. The same people still lived there: an old, retired officer, now impoverished, and his daughter.

He talked on and on… I listened attentively, with the feeling at the back of my mind that this was something that I knew well, when suddenly, quite simply – such is the way that extraordinary things happen – Jasmin turned to me and touched my arm, struck by a novel idea.

‘Why, do you know what? I’ve just thought,’ he said. ‘That must be where Meaulnes went – you know. The Great Meaulnes?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he went on, when I didn’t answer. ‘And I remember that the guardian mentioned the son of the family, an eccentric lad who had some extraordinary notions…’

I was no longer listening, convinced at once that he had guessed correctly and that before me – far from Meaulnes, far from all hope – had just opened, as clearly and simply as a familiar path, the road to the Estate Without a Name.

II

AT FLORENTIN’S

Now that I felt the outcome of this grave matter depended on me, I became as much a resolute and – as we say – ‘decided’ young man as I had previously been an unhappy, dreamy and withdrawn child. I do believe that it was from that very evening that my knee finally stopped hurting me.

All Monsieur Seurel’s family, in particular Uncle Florentin, a shopkeeper with whom we would sometimes spend the end of September, lived in the
commune
of Le Vieux-Nançay, which was the one where Le Domaine des Sablonnières lay. Since I did not have any more exams, I said that I did not want to wait for late September, and got permission to go straightaway to see my uncle. But I decided not to tell Meaulnes anything until I was certain that I could give him some good news – for what was the sense in lifting him out of his despair, only afterwards perhaps to plunge him even deeper into it?

Le Vieux-Nançay had long been the place that I loved most in the world: the scene of summer endings where we only went on very rare occasions, when there happened to be a carriage for hire that would take us there. There had previously been some quarrel with the branch of the family that lived there, and this may have been why Millie always took such urging before she would get into the carriage. What did I care, though, for all their disputes? And as soon as we arrived I would be absorbed into the life of my uncles and cousins and revel in its many amusing diversions and delights. We would stay with Uncle Florentin and Aunt Julie, who had a boy of my age, Cousin Firmin, and eight daughters, the eldest of whom, Marie-Louise and Charlotte, might have been seventeen and fifteen respectively.
They had a very big shop in front of the church at one of the gates of this little town, a general store which served all the landowners and hunters of this part of the Sologne, alone in the empty countryside, thirty kilometres from the nearest railway station.

The shop, with its grocery and dry-goods counters, had several windows overlooking the road and, on the side of the church square, a large glazed door. The odd thing, however, was that throughout the shop there was a dirt floor instead of a wooden one (though this was quite common in this poor region of the country).

At the back, there were six rooms, each containing one single kind of merchandise: the hat room, the gardening room, the lamp room, and so on… When I was a child walking through this maze of objects for sale, I thought I would never exhaust the wonder of looking at it. And in those days, too, I felt that this was the only place where there were any real holidays.

The family lived in a large kitchen, the door of which opened into the shop, a kitchen in which at the end of September great fires always blazed in the chimney, and hunters and poachers who sold game to Florentin came early in the morning to get a drink, while the girls, already up, would run around and shout and put ‘smells-good’ lotion on one another’s shining hair. On the wall were old photographs – with old school group photographs showing my father among his fellow students at the Ecole Normale (though it was hard to recognize him in his uniform).

This is where we spent the mornings, or else in the yard where Florentin grew dahlias and raised guineafowl, and where they roasted the coffee, sitting on soapboxes, and where we would unpack crates full of different objects meticulously wrapped – objects to which we could not always put a name…

All day long the shop was invaded by countryfolk or the coachmen from the large houses of the district. Vehicles, up from the depths of the country, would stop, dripping in the late September fog in front of the glazed door. And from the kitchen we could hear what the farm women said, full of curiosity about all their tables.

But the evening, after eight o’clock, as by lantern light we took hay to the horses steaming in the stable, was when the whole shop belonged to us!

Marie-Louise, the eldest of my girl cousins, but one of the smallest, would be folding and stowing away the lengths of cloth on the shelves and would encourage us to come and amuse her. So Firmin and I, with all the girls, would burst into the big shop under its inn lamps, winding the coffee grinders and performing acrobatics on the counters; and sometimes, because the dirt floor invited one to dance on it, Firmin would go to the attic and fetch an old trombone, covered in verdigris.

I still blush to think that, in earlier years, Mademoiselle de Galais could have arrived at such a moment and surprised us in the midst of all this childish activity… But it was a little before nightfall, one evening in that month of August, while I was quietly chatting with Marie-Louise and Firmin, that I saw her for the first time…

On the first evening after my arrival at Le Vieux-Nançay, I asked Uncle Florentin about Le Domaine des Sablonnières.

‘It’s not a proper estate any more,’ he said. ‘They sold everything, and the purchasers, who are hunters, had the old buildings pulled down to increase their hunting ground. The main courtyard is just a waste of heather and gorse. The former owners just kept a little, one-storey house and the farm. You’ll surely get a chance to see Mademoiselle de Galais here because she comes herself to buy groceries, either on horseback or in a trap, but always with the same horse, old Bélisaire… It’s an odd kind of set-up.’

I was so disturbed that I did not know what question to ask to find out more.