The Lost Estate (4 page)

After that, as long as there was any light, I would stay in the part of the building that comprised the town hall, shut up in the records room full of its dead flies and flapping posters, and read, sitting on an old weighing-machine near a window overlooking the garden.

When it was dark and the dogs on the farm next door would start to bark and the window of our little kitchen lit up, I would finally go home. My mother would have started to make dinner.
I would go up three steps on the staircase to the loft and sit there, silently, my head pressed against the cold banisters, watching her as she lit the fire in the narrow kitchen by the flickering light of a candle.

But someone came and swept me away from all these tranquil, childish joys – someone who snuffed out the candle that had cast its light on my mother’s gentle face as she prepared our evening meal; someone who turned off the light around which we gathered as a happy family on those evenings, after my father had closed the wooden shutters across the French windows. And that someone was Augustin Meaulnes, soon to be called by the other pupils ‘The Great Meaulnes’ – ‘
Le Grand Meaulnes’.

As soon as he came to board with us, that is, from the first days of December, school was no longer empty in the evening, after four. Despite the cold coming through the open door and the shouts of the sweepers with their buckets of water, there were always some twenty of the older boys after school in the classroom, boys from the country as well as from the village, pressing around Meaulnes. And there were long debates and endless arguments, and I would slip into the group, with a feeling of pleasurable anxiety.

Meaulnes would say nothing, though it was always for his benefit that one of the more talkative would push to the front of the crowd and, calling on each of his companions in turn to bear witness, which they noisily did, tell some lengthy tale of marauding and pillage that the others followed open-mouthed, with silent laughter.

Sitting, swinging his legs, on a desk, Meaulnes pondered. At the best moment in the story, he too would laugh, but softly, as though saving his bursts of laughter for a better story that he alone knew. Then as night fell and the classroom windows no longer gave enough light to the jumbled mass of boys, Meaulnes would suddenly stand up and shout, ‘Come on, off we go!’ as he walked through the crowd pressing around him.

Then they would all follow, and you could hear them shouting in the darkness from the far end of town…

*

I now used to go with them sometimes. With Meaulnes, I would go to the doors of the village stables where the cows were being milked. We would go into shops and, out of the darkness, between two creaks of his loom, the weaver would say, ‘Here are the students!’

Usually, at dinner time, we would be not far from school, with Desnoues, the wheelwright, who was also a farrier. His workshop used to be an inn, with big, double doors that we left open. From the street, you could hear the bellows of the forge squeaking and, by the light of the fire, in this murky, clanging place, you could sometimes make out countryfolk who had stopped their carts to chat for a while; or occasionally a schoolboy like ourselves, leaning against a door, watching and saying nothing.

And that is where it all began, roughly a week before Christmas.

III

‘I USED TO TAKE GREAT DELIGHT IN STANDING AT A BASKET-MAKER’S’

The rain had been falling all day long and only stopped in the evening. It had been a deadly boring day. At break times, no one went out, and you could hear my father, Monsieur Seurel, in the classroom constantly shouting: ‘Now then, boys, stop stomping around with those clogs!’

After the last break of the day – or, as we said, after the last ‘quarter hour’ – Monsieur Seurel, who for some time had been striding thoughtfully up and down, stopped, banged his ruler down on the table to quell the incoherent buzz that comes at the end of a boring class and, in the expectant silence that followed, asked, ‘Who’s coming to the station in the trap tomorrow with François, to meet Monsieur and Madame Charpentier?’

These were my grandparents: Grandfather Charpentier, the man with the big grey wool burnous, a retired forest warden who wore a rabbit fur hat which he called his
képi.
⁴
The small boys knew him well. In the morning, he would wash his face by drawing a bucket of water from the well and sploshing around in it like an old soldier, giving his goatee beard a splash or two. A circle of children would watch him, with their hands behind their backs, respectfully curious. They also knew Grandmother Charpentier, a little peasant woman with a knitted bonnet, because Millie would take her at least once into every infants’ class.

Every year, a few days before Christmas, we would go and fetch them from the station on the 4.02 train. In coming to see us, they would have crossed the whole
département,
laden with
bundles of chestnuts and Christmas fare wrapped in towels. As soon as the pair of them were over the threshold of the house, warmly clad and smiling, slightly bewildered, all the doors would be closed behind them and a whole week of fun would begin…

Someone was needed to drive the trap with me and bring them home, someone reliable who would not tip us into the ditch and also someone fairly easy-going, because Grandfather Charpentier swore freely, and my grandmother was quite a chatterbox.

A dozen voices answered Monsieur Seurel’s question, all shouting together, ‘Meaulnes! The Great Meaulnes!’

But Monsieur Seurel pretended not to hear.

So some shouted, ‘Fromentin!’ And others, ‘Jasmin Delouche!’

The youngest of the Roy lads, who would gallop across the fields on a sow, yelled, ‘Me! Me!’ in a piercing voice.

Dutremblay and Moucheboeuf just raised their hands shyly.

I should have liked it to be Meaulnes. This little trip in the donkey cart would have become a more significant event. He wanted it, too, but he affected a disdainful silence. All the big boys were sitting, as he was, on the table, backwards with their feet on the benches, as we used to at times of special leave or celebration. Coffin, his blue smock raised and tucked into his belt, was clasping the iron pillar that supported the ceiling of the classroom and began to climb up it to show how happy he was. But Monsieur Seurel brought us all down to earth by announcing, ‘Right! It will be Moucheboeuf.’ And we went back to our places in silence.

At four o’clock, in the great icy courtyard, streaked with gullies from the rain, I was alone with Meaulnes. Neither of us spoke as we looked out at the gleaming village drying in gusts of wind. It was not long before little Coffin, with his hood up and a slice of bread in his hand, emerged from his house and, hugging the wall, arrived, whistling, at the wheelwright’s door. Meaulnes opened the gate, called out to him, and, shortly after that, all three of us were sitting in the hot, red workshop where, from time to time, brisk gusts of ice-cold wind would blow:
there were Coffin and I, sitting by the forge, our muddy boots in the white wood shavings, and Meaulnes, with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing and leaning against the front door. Out in the street, now and then, a village woman would go by, head down against the wind, coming back from the butcher’s, and we looked up to see who it was.

No one said a word. The farrier and his man, the latter on the bellows while the farrier struck the hot iron, cast long, sharp shadows on the wall. I remember that evening as one of the greatest of my adolescent years. I felt a mixture of pleasure and anxiety, afraid that my companion might deprive me of the meagre joy of going to the station in the trap and, yet, at the same time, without daring to admit it even to myself, waiting for him to perform some spectacular feat that would alter all the arrangements…

From time to time, there would be a momentary halt in the peaceful, regular work of the forge. The farrier would let his hammer ring clear on the anvil with brief, sharp blows, then bring the piece of iron that he had worked close to his leather apron to examine it. And, looking up, he would say to us, ‘Well, lads, how’s it going?’ – as a chance to catch his breath.

His assistant would stay with his raised hand on the chain of the bellows, put his left fist on his hip and look at us, laughing.

Then the heavy, noisy thumping would resume.

It was in one of these breaks that we saw Millie through the double door, wearing a tight scarf against the strong wind and going by, carrying lots of small parcels.

The farrier asked, ‘Is Monsieur Charpentier coming soon?’

‘Tomorrow, with my grandmother,’ I replied. ‘I’m going to meet them in the trap from the 4.02 train.’

‘In Fromentin’s trap, is it?’

I answered, ‘No, Old Martin’s.’

‘Well, now, you’ll never be back.’ And both of them, the farrier and his man, began to laugh.

For the sake of saying something, the assistant said, slowly, ‘With Fromentin’s mare, you could have fetched them from Vierzon. The train stops there for an hour. It’s fifteen kilometres.
You’d have been home before Old Martin’s ass was even harnessed up.’

‘Now that,’ said the farrier, ‘is a mare that covers some ground.’

‘And I’m sure Fromentin would be happy to lend it.’

That’s where the conversation stopped. The forge was once more a place full of sparks and noise where everyone thought his own thoughts.

But when the time came to leave, and I got up to signal to Meaulnes, he didn’t notice me at first. Leaning back against the door, head bowed, he seemed to be thinking deeply about what had been said. Seeing him there, lost in meditation and peering, as though through a deep bank of fog, at these people intent on their work, I suddenly thought of the picture in
Robinson Crusoe
where you see the English boy, before his great adventure, ‘standing at a basket-maker’s’.
⁵

I have often thought of it since.

IV

ESCAPE

At one o’clock in the afternoon on the following day, the classroom of the Upper School is as distinct against the frosted landscape as a boat on the surface of the sea. It doesn’t smell of brine and sump oil, like a fishing boat, but of grilled herrings on the stove and the scorched wool of the boys who have come in and warmed themselves too close to the fire.

The end of the year is getting closer and the essay books have been handed round. While M. Seurel is writing up the questions on the blackboard, there is a partial silence, broken by whispered conversations, little, stifled cries and sentences cut short which are meant to terrify the boy next to the speaker: ‘Sir, sir! So-and-so has…’

As he writes out his questions, M. Seurel is thinking of other things. From time to time, he turns round, giving all of us a look that is at the same time stern and vague. The furtive whispering and shuffling stop dead for a moment, then resume, subdued at first, like a gathering drone.

I alone am silent in the midst of all this agitation. As I am at the end of a table in the section reserved for the youngest in the class, near the large windows, I have only to sit up a little to see the garden, with the stream at the bottom, and then the fields.

From time to time, I stand on tiptoe, looking anxiously towards the farm of La Belle-Etoile. As soon as the class started, I noticed that Meaulnes had not come back after the midday break. The boy who shares his desk must of course have noticed it too. So far he has not said anything, because he has been taken up too much with his work. But as soon as he looks up,
the news will spread through the whole room and someone, as usual, will certainly shout out the first words of the sentence: ‘Please, sir, Meaulnes…’

I know that Meaulnes has gone. Or, to be more precise, I suspect him of having escaped. As soon as lunch was finished, he must have jumped over the little wall and struck out across the fields, over the stream at La Vieille-Planche as far as La Belle-Etoile. He would have asked for the mare to go and fetch Monsieur and Madame Charpentier. He would be getting it harnessed up at that moment.

La Belle-Etoile is a large farm on the side of the hill, over beyond the stream. In summer, it is hidden by elms, by the oaks in the yard and by hedgerows. It stands on a little track that leads, in one direction, to the station road, and in the other to a village. The vast farmhouse, dating from feudal times, is surrounded by high walls with buttresses that rise out of a bed of manure; in June, it vanishes among the leaves, and all that you can know of it from school is the sound of carts rumbling and cowmen shouting as night begins to fall. But today, between the leafless trees, I can look through the window and see the tall, greyish farmyard wall, then the gateway and, between two lengths of hedge, the line of the track, white with frost, running alongside the river and leading to the station road.

So far, nothing is moving in this clear winter landscape. As yet, nothing has changed.

Here, Monsieur Seurel is just finishing writing out the second question. Usually, he gives us three, but what if, by some chance, today, he were to give us only two… He would immediately go back to his desk and notice that Meaulnes is not here. Then he would send two boys to look for him in the village, and they would surely find him before the mare was harnessed up.

For a moment, after copying out the second question, Monsieur Seurel lets his tired arm fall. Then, much to my relief, he goes to a new line and starts to write, saying, ‘Now this one is child’s play!’

Two small black shapes which earlier rose above the wall of La Belle-Etoile have vanished: they must have been the two
raised shafts of the trap. I am sure that preparations are being made over there for Meaulnes’ departure. Now we have the mare: her head and neck emerge between the posts of the gate, then stop, no doubt while a second seat is being fixed at the back of the trap for the travellers that he claims to be meeting. Finally, the whole team slowly leaves the yard, vanishes for a moment behind the hedge, then proceeds at the same leisurely pace along the length of white track that you can see through a gap in the hedge. It is then that, in the dark shape holding the reins, casually leaning as the peasants do with one elbow on the side of the cart, I recognize my friend Augustin Meaulnes.