The Lost Estate (25 page)

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.’

Mechanically – you could tell that he had been doing this since that morning and was now used to it – he began to rock the crib.

‘She can already laugh,’ he said. ‘And she holds your finger. Haven’t you seen her?’

He opened the curtains, and I saw a puffy little red face and a little head that had been lengthened and deformed by the forceps.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ said Monsieur de Galais. ‘The doctor said that it will all put itself right. Give her your finger and she’ll grasp it.’

I was discovering a world here that I did not know and felt my heart full of a strange joy that I had not previously experienced…

Monsieur de Galais carefully half opened the door to the young woman’s bedroom. She was not asleep.

‘You can come in,’ he said.

She was lying there, her face flushed and her blonde hair spread around it. She offered me her hand, smiling, with a weary look. I complimented her on her daughter. In a rather hoarse voice and with unaccustomed roughness – the curt manner of someone returning from combat – she said, with a smile, ‘Yes, but they damaged her for me!’

I soon had to leave so as not to tire her.

The next day, Sunday, in the afternoon, I hurried round to Les Sablonnières in an almost joyful mood. A notice pinned to the door stopped my hand in mid-air: ‘Please do not ring’.

I did not guess what it meant. I knocked quite loudly and heard muffled footsteps running inside. Someone I did not know, the doctor from Vierzon, opened the door.

‘Well, what is it?’ I asked.

‘Hush! Hush!’ he said softly, with an air of irritation. ‘The little girl almost died last night, and the mother is very ill.’

Completely taken aback, I followed him on tiptoe to the first floor. The baby asleep in her cot was very pale, quite white,
like a dead child. The doctor thought he could save her. As for the mother, he could not guarantee anything… He explained it to me at length, as the only friend of the family, talking about pulmonary congestion and embolism. He was hesitant, uncertain… Monsieur de Galais came in, grown horribly old in two days, haggard and shaking.

He took me into the bedroom without quite knowing what he was doing.

‘You mustn’t frighten her,’ he whispered. ‘The doctor’s order is that we must persuade her that it will be all right.’

Yvonne de Galais was lying with her face congested and her head back as she had been on the day before. Her cheeks and her forehead were dark red and her eyes rolled intermittently as though she were suffocating, as she fought against death with indescribable courage and patience.

She could not speak, but she held out her burning hand to me with so much affection that I almost burst into tears.

‘Well, well, now,’ Monsieur de Galais said, very loudly, with a frightful jollity that seemed close to madness. ‘You can see that for someone ill she doesn’t look so bad!’

I did not know how to reply, but held the young, dying woman’s burning hand in mine.

She was trying to say something to me, to ask me a question. She looked towards me, then at the window, as if telling me to go outside and look for someone… But then she was seized by a terrible fit of breathlessness. Her lovely blue eyes, which had for a moment made such a tragic appeal to me, rolled upwards; her cheeks and her brow darkened, and she struggled gently, seeking to the last to control her terror and her despair. They rushed forward – the doctor and the nurses – with an oxygen flask, with towels and bottles, while the old man, leaning over her, was shouting – shouting as though she were already far away from him – in his rough, quavering voice, ‘Don’t be afraid, Yvonne. It’s nothing. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Then the crisis passed. She was able to breathe a little, but she was still half suffocating, her eyes white, her head thrown back, still struggling, but unable, even for a moment, to pull
herself out of the abyss into which she had already sunk, in order to look at me and speak to me. And, since I was unable to do anything, I had to bring myself to leave. Of course, I could have stayed a moment longer – and at the thought I feel seized by terrible remorse. But what can I say? I still had hope. I convinced myself that the end was not so near.

When I reached the edge of the wood behind the house, remembering the young woman’s eyes turning towards the window, I scrutinized like a sentry or a manhunter the depth of this wood through which Augustin had once come and through which he had left the previous winter. Alas, nothing stirred; not an unusual shadow, not a branch moving… But eventually, in the distance, towards the avenue that led from Préveranges, I heard the faint sound of a bell, and soon at the corner of the path a child in a red skullcap and a schoolboy’s smock appeared, walking behind a priest… And I left, fighting back my tears.

The next day was the first day of term. By seven o’clock, there were already two or three boys in the courtyard. I waited some time before going down and showing myself. When at last I did appear, turning the key in the door of the musty classroom which had been closed for two months, the thing that I most feared in the world happened: the biggest of the boys left the group playing under the shelter and came over to me. He wanted to let me know that ‘the young lady from Les Sablonnières died yesterday at nightfall’.

Everything now is muddled for me, everything confused in grief. It seems to me that I shall never again have the strength to teach.

Just walking across the desolate school yard is a knee-breaking effort. Everything is painful, everything bitter, now that she is dead. The world is empty, the holidays are over. Those long carriage rides are over, the mysterious fête is over… Everything has reverted to the misery it was before…

I have told the children that there would be no class that morning. They leave in small groups to pass the news on to others in the country around. As for me, I take my black hat
and a braided coat that I have, and make my miserable way towards Les Sablonnières.

Here I am in front of the house that we searched for so long, three years ago. It was in this house that Yvonne de Galais, wife of Augustin Meaulnes, died yesterday evening. A stranger would think it was a chapel, so deep is the silence that has fallen since yesterday on this desolate place.