The Lost Estate (28 page)

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.

He did not refuse, knowing that by then he would long since have left town. And she stayed for a long time at her low window, in the sloping street, waving to him vaguely.

He was in a hurry to get away.

Before leaving, he could not resist the melancholy urge to go one final time in front of Valentine’s house. He stared long and hard at it, and stored up a feeling of sadness. It was one of the last houses on the outskirts of town, and the street became a road from there on. Opposite, a sort of patch of waste ground made something resembling a little square. There was no one at the windows or in the courtyard, anywhere – only one dirty,
heavily powdered girl going past a wall and dragging two urchins with her.

This is where Valentine’s childhood had been spent, where she had started to see the world with her trusting, submissive eyes. She had worked, she had sewn behind those windows. Frantz had come to see her and smile at her in this suburban street. But now there was nothing, nothing left… The sad evening wore on and Meaulnes only knew that somewhere on this same afternoon, lost, Valentine was looking at this dreary square in her mind’s eye and would never return here.

The long return journey that he had in front of him would be his last defence against unhappiness, his last forced distraction before he lapsed into it entirely.

He set off. At the sides of the road, in the valley, between the trees, delightful farm houses at the river’s edge showed their pointed gables decorated with green trelliswork. No doubt, on the lawns, there were intense young girls talking of love. One could imagine souls, beautiful souls…

But for Meaulnes at that moment there was only one love, the unsatisfied love that had just been so cruelly assaulted, and the girl whom he should, above all others, have protected and safeguarded, was the very one that he had just sent to her ruin.

A few hastily written lines in the diary informed me that he had determined to find Valentine, at whatever cost, before it was too late. A date at the corner of a page gave me to think that this was the long journey for which Madame Meaulnes was getting him ready when I came to La Ferté-d’Angillon and upset all his schemes. In the abandoned town hall, Meaulnes had been noting down his memories and his plans one fine morning at the end of August, when I opened the door and brought him the great news for which he had ceased to hope. He was caught up again and paralysed by his old adventure, not daring to do anything or to confess anything. And this was when the remorse, the regret and the grief had begun, at times repressed, at others driving out all other ideas, until the wedding
day when the gypsy’s shout in the trees had dramatically reminded him of the first oath of his young manhood.

On that same monthly composition book, he had quickly scribbled a few more words at dawn before leaving – with her permission, but for ever – Yvonne de Galais, his wife since the previous day:

‘I am leaving. I have to find the trail of the two gypsies who came yesterday to the fir wood and who set off by bicycle towards the east. I shall only return to Yvonne if I can bring back with me Frantz and Valentine, married, and settle them in “Frantz’s house”.

‘This manuscript which I began as a secret diary, and which has become my confession, is to be the property of my friend François Seurel, should I not return.’

He must have quickly slipped this exercise book under the rest, locked his small, old schoolboy trunk and vanished.

EPILOGUE

Time passed, I was losing hope of ever seeing my friend again, and dreary days went by in the peasant school, and sad ones in the empty house. Frantz did not come to the meeting that we had arranged and, in any case, it was a long time since my Aunt Moinel had known where Valentine was living.

The only joy at Les Sablonnières was, very soon, the little girl, whom they had managed to save. At the end of September, she even gave signs of growing up as a healthy and pretty child. She was nearly one year old. Clutching the backs of chairs, she would push them along by herself, trying to walk, not bothered about falling over and making a continual din that would rouse the dull echoes of the abandoned house. When I held her in my arms, she would never allow me to kiss her. She had a wild and delightful way of wriggling and, at the same time, pushing my face away with her little hand held open, all the time laughing aloud. It was as though, with all her merriment and all her childish energy, she would drive away the sorrow that had hung over the house since her birth. I sometimes thought, ‘I expect that, for all her wildness, she will be a little bit my child.’ Once again, fate would decide otherwise.

One Sunday morning at the end of September, I had got up very early, even before the country woman who cared for the little girl. I meant to go fishing in the Cher, with Jasmin Delouche and two men from Saint-Benoist. The village people from around there would often include me in their great poaching expeditions: fishing by hand or, at night, with illegal nets. Throughout the summer, on holidays, we would start at dawn
and not return until noon. For almost all these men, this was their livelihood, while for me it was my only recreation, the only adventures that reminded me of the escapades we used to have. Eventually, I had come to enjoy these excursions, the hours spent fishing along the river bank or among the reeds in the lake.

So that morning I was up at half-past five and waiting in front of the house, in a little shelter up against the wall that separated the English garden at Les Sablonnières from the kitchen garden of the farm. I was busy untying my nets, which I had thrown down in a heap on the previous Thursday.

It was not quite daylight, but the moment before dawn on a fine September morning, and the shelter where I was disentangling my things was half plunged in darkness.

I was there, silent and busy, when suddenly I heard the gate open and the noise of footsteps on the gravel path. ‘What’s this?’ I thought. ‘These people are earlier than I expected. And I’m not even ready!’

But the man coming into the yard was someone I didn’t know. As far as I could make out, he was a tall fellow, with a beard, dressed like a huntsman or a poacher. Instead of coming to get me where the others knew I would always be when we had arranged to meet, he went directly to the front door.

‘Right!’ I thought. ‘It’s one of their friends, someone they’ve invited without telling me: they’ve sent him on ahead.’

Softly and silently, the man tried the latch of the door; but I had locked it as I went out. He did the same at the kitchen door, then, after hesitating for a moment, he turned round towards me, with an anxious face, lit by the half-light. Only then did I recognize The Great Meaulnes.

For a long time, I stayed there, frightened, desperate, suddenly overwhelmed with all the pain reawakened by this return. He had gone to the back of the house and walked round; now he was coming back, uncertainly.

So I went across to him and, without a word, embraced him, sobbing. He understood at once.

‘Ah!’ he said, curtly, ‘she’s dead, isn’t she?’

And he stood there, terrible in his silence and immobility.
I took him by the arm and gently led him towards the house. Day had now broken. Right away, to get the worst over, I showed him the staircase leading to the room where she died. As soon as he went in, he fell on his knees by the bed and stayed for a long time with his head wrapped in his arms.

He got up at last, wild-eyed, swaying, not knowing where he was. Still leading him by the arm, I opened the door between that room and the little girl’s. She had woken up all by herself, while her nurse was downstairs, and had sat herself up purposefully in her cot. You could just see her head, turned towards us with a look of surprise.

‘This is your daughter,’ I said.

He gave me a startled look. Then he grasped her and lifted her in his arms. At first, because he was crying, he could not see her properly. Then, to distract attention from this flood of tears and strong emotions, holding the girl tightly against him, seated on his right arm, he turned towards me with bowed head and said, ‘I’ve brought the other two back… You can go and see them in their house.’

And, indeed, when later that morning I set off, thoughtful and almost happy, towards Frantz’s house, which Yvonne de Galais had once shown me empty, I saw from a distance someone like a young housewife in a white collar, sweeping the doorstep, attracting the attentive curiosity of several little cowherds on their way to Mass, dressed in their Sunday best…

Meanwhile, the little girl was growing tired of being held so tightly and, as Augustin, turning his head to hide and stem the flow of tears, was still not looking at her, she gave him a great slap with her little hand on his moist, bearded mouth.

This time the father lifted his daughter up high, tossed her in his arms and looked at her with a kind of laugh. She clapped her hands contentedly.

I had stepped back a bit to see them better. Filled with wonder, and a sense of slight disappointment, even so, I realized that the girl had at last found the companion for whom she had unconsciously been waiting. I felt that The Great Meaulnes
had come back to deprive me of the only joy that he had left me. And already I imagined him, one evening, wrapping his daughter in a cloak and setting off with her for some new adventure.

Notes

1
.
My mother took the junior class:
The educational reforms instituted by Jules Ferry (1832–93) in the early 1880s provided France with a system of primary education that was universal, obligatory, free and non-religious. It covered the years from six to eleven, in the
cours élémentaire
and the
cours moyen
(which I have translated as ‘junior school’ and ‘middle school’). Monsieur Seurel was one of a new army of schoolteachers created by the Ferry reforms.

2
.
departmental préfet:
The main administrative district in France is the
département
, of which there are ninety-five in France itself, plus two overseas. The chief executive of the
département
is the
préfet.

3
.
Fourteenth of July:
The French national day, a holiday marked by fireworks and festivities. It commemorates the capture of the Bastille prison in 1789, a date usually taken as the start of the French Revolution.

4
.
képi:
The cap, with a circular top and a peak, worn by French policemen, military officers and other officials.

5
.
standing at a basket-maker’s:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, chapter XI: ‘It prov’d of excellent advantage to me now, that when I was a boy, I used to take great delight in standing at a basketmaker’s, in the town where my father liv’d, to see them make their Wicker-ware’. There were several translations of Defoe’s novel in nineteenth-century France. Alain-Fournier may have been thinking of one published around 1875 with illustrations by Grandville.

6
.
three and a half leagues:
A league is a distance of about four kilometres.

7
.
those squally Thursdays:
Thursdays were left free in French schools, and students had to attend school on Saturdays.

8
.
Rousseau and Paul-Louis Courier:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–78) was one of the most influential figures of his time, the author of works on politics, education and other topics, and of the autobiographical
Confessions
. Paul-Louis Courier (1772–1825) was well known for his anti-clerical views. He wrote pamphlets in defence of the interests of citizens against State and Church, and translated works from Greek, including Longus’
Daphnis and Chloe
.

9
.
the men mobilized from the Seine in 1870:
That is, the men from the
département
of Seine mobilized to fight in the Franco-Prussian War.

10
.
Talma or Léotard:
François-Joseph Talma (1763–1826) was the leading actor on the French stage in the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Jules Léotard (1839–70) was a famous acrobat who gave his name to the single-piece garment that he favoured for his work.