The Lost Estate (19 page)

‘Weren’t they rich, though?’

‘Yes. Monsieur de Galais threw parties to amuse his son, an odd boy, full of extraordinary ideas. He did whatever he could to entertain him, bringing women down from Paris… and boys from Paris and elsewhere…

‘All of Les Sablonnières was in ruins, and Madame de Galais near the end of her life, but they still tried to entertain him
and humoured his every whim. It was last winter… no, the winter before that, when they held their biggest fancy dress party. They had invited some people from Paris and some from the country, and bought or hired lots of wonderful costumes, games, horses and boats. Just to amuse Frantz de Galais. They said that he was going to get married and that he was celebrating his engagement, but he was much too young. And suddenly it all fell to pieces. He ran off and hasn’t been seen since… When the mistress died, Mademoiselle de Galais was suddenly left all alone with her father, the old sea captain.’

‘She’s not married?’ I asked, finally.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard it mentioned. Might you be a suitor?’

Somewhat put out, I admitted as briefly and as discreetly as possible that my best friend, Augustin Meaulnes, could perhaps be one.

‘Ah!’ Florentin said with a smile. ‘If he’s not concerned about money, she’d be a good match. Should I talk about it to Monsieur de Galais? He still comes here sometimes to look for some buckshot for hunting. I always get him to try my old brandy.’

I hastily begged him not to do anything, but to wait. I, too, was not in a hurry to inform Meaulnes. All these lucky accidents, one after another, made me rather uneasy, and this anxiety told me to say nothing to Meaulnes until I had at least seen the girl.

I did not have long to wait. The next day, a little before dinner, night was just falling and a cold mist, more appropriate to September than August, came down with the darkness. Firmin and I, guessing that the shop would shortly be empty of customers, had come in to see Marie-Louise and Charlotte. I had entrusted both of them with the secret that had brought me at such an early date to Le Vieux-Nançay. Leaning on the counter or sitting with both hands flat on the waxed wooden surface, we were telling each other all that we knew about the mysterious young woman – which amounted to very little – when the sound of wheels outside made our heads turn.

‘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 could 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.