A Little Tour through the Land of Alain-Fournier
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Since we live in the French "Middle West" as it were (and I was born and raised in Iowa), this route allows me, my French wife Françoise, and our seven-year-old son Justin to "dis-enclave" ourselves (if I may be allowed to translate literally the appropriate French expression); that is, to escape from the confines of our adopted Anjou, from the at times too soothing douceur angevine (as celebrated in a famous sonnet by Joachim du Bellay), and find once again the invigorating air and inspiring vistas of the peaks. From Angers, it takes three-and-a-half to four hours of attentive driving to reach the outskirts of Vierzon and, a short break or two aside (a hot chocolate in Saint-Avertin; a stint of skipping rocks across the canal near Thénioux), we naturally attempt to make mileage over this monotonous part of our itinerary, having let ourselves be tempted only once—and it was worth the detour—by the tiny Romanesque church in Meusnes with its haunting luminosity.
Despite our impatience to leave the plains behind and attain the gentle volcanic contours of the Massif Central or the high pastures of the Alps, I always feel remorse as we whiz past an almost unnoticeable sign to the left, in the village of Châtres-sur-Cher, signaling departmental road D-41. This country highway heads to Theillay and from there to Neuvy-sur-Barangeon. These place-names of course mean nothing to most people; they at best seem to indicate hick towns buried in la France profonde. Yet lovers of literature will have read their maps correctly. At Neuvy-sur-Barangeon, you can get on departmental highway D-926, which, after only ten miles, brings you to La Chapelle-d'Angillon, the birthplace of Henri Fournier, much better-known as Alain-Fournier (1886-1914), the author of Le GrandMeaulnes (1913) or—as some English-language translators have rendered the title—The Lost Domaine. (A translation popular in America is titled The Wanderer.) An enduring classic, this novel is a mysterious and troubling account of a provincial childhood, of male companionship (between François Seurel, the first-person narrator, and Augustin Meaulnes, nicknamed "Le Grand Meaulnes"—whence the title), of a teenager's search for freedom and adventure, and of tragic early-adulthood love. For admirers of Alain-Fournier's unique combination of unsettling symbolism and vivid imagery, of exact autobiographical recollection and dreamy romanticism, it is as frustrating to speed by that obscure turn-off as it would be, mutatis mutandis, to consistently bypass Hannibal, Missouri.
Just last July, we veered left. Our decision was not spontaneous, and I had prepared myself for the detour by rereading Le Grand Meaulnes in the excellently annotated, alas out-of-print "Classiques Garnier" edition (which also collects Alain-Fournier's short stories, prose poems, and poems under the title Miracles), by perusing his second, unfinished novel Colombe Blanchet and his Chroniques etcritiques (he began working as a Parisian literary journalist in 1910), and by inquiring ahead of time about the visiting hours of the two Alain-Fournier museums, the first situated in a château at La Chapelle-d'Angillon (in whose dark nearby woods "the strange fête" of the novel was probably set), the second lodged in the Épineuil-le-Fleuriel schoolhouse (where the vivid first scenes of the story definitely take place and in which the author lived from 1891 to 1898, during which time his parents were the local teachers and thus furnished with the adjoining appartement de fonction). Épineuil-le-Fleuriel (or "Sainte-Agathe," as it is called in the novel) is located some seventy miles to the south—down tollway A-71—from La Chapelle-d'Angillon, but in the novel this distance is reduced to about nine miles, so that Augustin Meaulnes can credibly make his escape from the schoolhouse (where he boards with François's parents), then embark on his "adventure," first by horse-drawn buggy, then by foot, and finally arrive in a gloomy forest. After a while, he wanders into a château, falls asleep, only to awake to bizarre festivities taking place in his midst. The merrymaking celebrates the engagement of the wayward son of the château, Frantz de Galais, and a seamstress, Valentine. At the last minute, however, Valentine inexplicably breaks the engagement, refuses to show up, and the party ends.
We were also armed for this literary pilgrimage, at least in my and Françoise's cases, with a renewed awareness of our own childhoods. Little matter where you come from, reading Alain-Fournier's novel incites you to re-envision your own lost school years, those best friends who vanished forever (and like Meaulnes, without leaving any explanation whatsoever), those brutally terminated infatuations, those secret places (like François's attic room and its skylight) in which you could take refuge and were somehow more deeply "yourself" than elsewhere.
Hence our valiant twelve-year-old Peugeot 205 compact car was crammed not only with boxes, suitcases, and hiking equipment (as well as with a full-sized Macintosh computer console and printer that we also needed to transport to the Alps), but also with my Des Moines upbringing, with Françoise's provincial French one (and like many French pupils, she read Le Grand Meaulnes when she was in her teens), as well as—last but not least—with Justin's ongoing enfance, if indeed those mysterious screens had not already started to rise between himself and the world: from immediate experiencing, we move on to consciously filtered experiencing of the experiencing, from perceiving to apperceiving. Such phenomena of growing-up constitute Alain-Fournier's deepest-running philosophical theme, and his novel in this respect is not just a haunting fiction about coming-of-age and first love, but also a sort of melancholic spiritual autobiography implicitly defining his ontological separation from the presence of the world; similarly, the book does not just graphically and sympathetically paint the landscapes of central France but also provides a moving literary lesson in "sentimental geography." The narrator François, destined to be a writer (as becomes clear in a late scene where he summarizes Meaulnes's obscure notebook jottings), is increasingly engaged, not in the present, but rather in what might be called his future retrospective childhood. He is still an adolescent, but already—in his mind—an adult looking backward at his adolescence. The bitter opening lines of Le Grand Meaulnes set the tone: "He arrived at our house on a Sunday in November, 189—. I still say 'our' house although it is no longer ours. Nearly fifteen years have passed since we left the region, and we shall not be going back to it."
Alain-Fournier's own obsessively documentary photos, taken of the schoolhouse and the village while he was living in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel (and thus when he was at the same age he attributes to François), likewise reveal how precociously and precisely aware he was of what was slipping through his fingers. Alain-Fournier was not just a talented observer; he knew how to commemorate details: the "tapping of a leafless rose branch against the window"; the attic bedroom door which "jammed against the floor and could not be shut properly"; the "creak" of the courtyard gate when it opened, and François's "secret hope to hear that squeak, knowing that it would be followed by the sound of sabots either on the steps or being wiped on the threshold, sometimes followed by whispering, as if our visitors were working out a strategy before coming in." Surely the adult Alain-Fournier experienced such details retrospectively, as painful losses, a likelihood recalling John Fowles's perspicacious observation about the novel in his essay, "The Lost Domaine of Alain-Fournier": "What Fournier pinned down is one truly acute perception of the young, which is the awareness of loss as a function of passing time. It is at that age that we first know that we shall never do everything we dream. . . . It is above all when we first grasp the black paradox at the heart of the human condition, that the satisfaction of the desire is also the death of the desire."
Our left turn soon brought us into the Sologne, a forest-and-lake-covered region proverbial for its wild game. Hunting is evoked in Le Grand Meaulnes, and our first indication that we were entering entangled woods akin to those in which Meaulnes loses his way was a triangular sign that I have never seen anywhere else. "AUTOMOBILISTES ATTENTION," admonished this sign, as do those—notably in the Alps and the Massif Central—pointing out the potential danger of cows grazing on the road. But this sign in the Sologne depicted, with some very fine pointillist illustrations by the way, not livestock, but rather a stag, a doe, and above all a wild boar. Wild boar are plentiful in some parts of France, but the appearance—and so delicately pictured—of this resolutely untameable animal on a road sign nonetheless announced the first slightly fantastical event in our search for the presence of Alain-Fournier's novel. Nor, we immediately understood, would it matter whether we actually had to brake at some point because a sow was trotting across the highway, followed by her litter of brown-and-beige-striped marcassins. As for Meaulnes (for whom realizing his dream matters less than perpetuating it: note his behavior when François manages to bring him and Yvonne back together, let alone his flight soon after their wedding), a spectacular vision—in our case, the triangular sign with its pointillist boar—sufficed to enflame our imaginations. Soon we were qualifying, in French, such unexpected surreal occurrences as being examples of uneambianceGrand-Meaulnes.
It was time to take a break. In Theillay we spotted a café near a small train station—a "whistle-stop" would be more exact. I steered our 205 into an illegal, but shaded, spot along the road. A new "Grand-Meaulnes ambience" set in forthwith when I pointed out that the café had no name (not even the name of a proprietor: "Chez Yvette," for example, or indeed "Chez Yvonne") and that it was situated alongside probably the last manually-operated train-crossing gate left in France. In fact, just as we sat down at a small wobbly circular steel table, beneath a gigantic wisteria that must be heady with sweet peppery perfume when in bloom, a young woman appeared across the road and cranked down the gate, an act soon accompanied by flashing lights and ringing bells. The cars on the road began forming an increasingly long line.
No train appeared. The drivers waited, with an eerie patience. I thought of the importance of trains in Le Grand Meaulnes, namely in the key event that, after Meaulnes's arrival, launches the fantastical part of the narrative: François's grandparents are coming to Sainte-Agathe for a long visit and someone must fetch them at "La Gare" (actually Vallon-en-Sully, near Épineuil-le-Fleuriel). Meaulnes decides to impress everyone by obtaining a horse and buggy and meeting the train, not at La Gare, but rather at Vierzon, which is located up the track from there.
Once again, Alain-Fournier greatly miniaturizes French geography so that he can bring together his two beloved childhood sites: as has already been made clear, Vierzon is near La Chapelle-d'Angillon and thus also, oddly, the Theillay whistle-stop. One gradually senses, in fact, that Alain-Fournier's novelistic manipulation of landscape almost has less to do with the demands of his narrative than with his own emotional need to bring closer together the dispersed sites of his childhood. As the son of a teacher who was successively appointed to various schools, Alain-Fournier experienced these transfers as exile and uprootedness. And by the time he began working on Le Grand Meaulnes, he had been a junior-high-school student in Paris (1898-1901), a student at the Brest naval high school (1901-1902) in Brittany, then a high-school student back in central France, in Bourges (1903).
Sitting outside the nameless café, sipping a syrupy grenadine, waiting for this train which didn't want to come (and in which it was easy to imagine François's grandparents sitting on a hard bench and fanning themselves, because Theillay seemed so indifferent to the pace of modern France), wondering if we ourselves would be able to get to the other side of the crossing, I found little else to do but acquiesce to the way the world was turning and to watch a hen squeeze underneath a wooden fence—which of course brought to mind the chicken-thieving that occurs when Frantz, who out of despair over his broken engagement has joined a band of Gypsy actors, arrives in Sainte-Agathe for a series of performances. His life no longer having any meaning or goal, Frantz will wander far, even as Meaulnes seeks out in Paris Frantz's sister Yvonne; and during this period François, as narrative strands interweave and chance encounters make a double reconciliation possible, will be caught up in ambiguous relationships with both Meaulnes and Yvonne. Alain-Fournier's letters to his brother-in-law, the writer Jacques Rivière, disclose that the fictional character Yvonne de Galais was inspired by one Yvonne de Quièvrecourt, a woman to whom the novelist spontaneously spoke one day near the Grand-Palais in Paris—much in the way that Meaulnes boldly engages a conversation with Yvonne during the strange fête. In other words, with respect to Alain-Fournier, who is François Seurel and who is Augustin Meaulnes?
Even without these biographical facts in mind, one intuits that Meaulnes is part-François, and that François is part-Meaulnes—and that Alain-Fournier is both. It moreover appears (according to research that has been undertaken on the local school records) that no boarder similar to the fictional Meaulnes (whose name derives from a nearby town, Meaulne, situated three miles from Épineuil-le-Fleuriel) ever attended the school. Meaulnes was thus the ideal companion or the imaginary older brother whom the young Henri Fournier would have liked to have had in the room next to his, in that lonely attic where he would spend time looking through the skylight at the surrounding fields and then, perhaps, trembling in bed out of fear before finally falling asleep. In the Alain-Fournier museum in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, one learns that little Henri kept a long stick near his bed; whenever he became too afraid, he would bang the stick on the wooden floor and his father would come up to calm him.
This question of a real-life model behind the fictional Meaulnes becomes even thornier when one remembers that, in his first appearance in the novel, the young man significantly appears "from nowhere." François's mother is talking to Mme. Meaulnes when suddenly, as François reports,
In the Seurel family's appartement de fonction it seems improbable that Meaulnes could have sneaked upstairs without being seen by his mother, by Mme. Seurel or by François; not to mention the unlikelihood of a boy back then, caught up in such social circumstances, daring to trespass into private quarters of someone else's home. Yet Meaulnes, unbeknownst to the others downstairs, does explore the attic all by himself and then descend, emerging in "deepening shadows." (Alain-Fournier often evokes the "shadows" haunting bedrooms and other dwelling spaces.) "At first all I could see of him," recalls François, "was his peasant hat of felt, pushed to the back of his head, and his black smock, belted like a schoolboy's. But I could also see that he was smiling." Meaulnes's descent from the attic points up his natural, unruly intrepidity, yet it also enveils his character, from the onset of this curious fictionalized memoir, in a mystery that will never be lifted—a mystery described by François at one point as being Meaulnes's habit of remaining "so remote from us, empty, and unable to find happiness." The attic is, furthermore, François's secret hideaway par excellence. The potential psychoanalytical symbolism of Meaulnes's coming down the stairs (and of having been unseen when initially going up them) is thus manifold.
One of the most disquieting qualities of the novel results from this ambivalence of character: François is the first-person narrator whose essential role includes speaking directly to us, introducing us to Meaulnes, even acting as his "editor" so that we can plunge—later in the novel—more deeply into his private thoughts; yet Meaulnes is simultaneously the fascinating, admired, slightly elder, instigator of "adventures," the center of attention. Meaulnes is the one who acts, François the writer who must yield the leading role to his protagonist, who records the protagonist's deeds. Yet when Meaulnes disappears shortly after the wedding, it is François who, despite his natural self-reserve and lack of self-confidence, takes on the main role by frequently looking in on Yvonne (who is pregnant), and who ends up caring for the baby girl when the mother dies soon after giving birth. Before her death, Yvonne is essentially "loved" much more selflessly, and more consistently (though the affection is Platonic) by François than by Meaulnes. Long before these tragic final pages (yet an ultimate twist occurs, equally laden with symbolic meaning), one perceives that the two main characters each lack fully distinct boundaries. This is no literary shortcoming, however. On the contrary, Alain-Fournier has pulled off a tantalizing tour de force resembling the way in which Joseph Conrad's equally ambiguous main characters in The Secret Sharer revolve around each other like double stars, their respective energies flowing back and forth between each other through mutual gravitational attraction. There is also something rather similar here to Jim and Huckleberry Finn's relationship, during their Mississippi River escapade. The initially more passive character (Jim or François) can paradoxically capture the limelight and permit the plot to move forward.
(An old red-and-yellow locomotive finally glided past, pulling not a passenger car in which François's grandparents were fanning themselves, but rather a flat car piled with Sologne timber—a fact not unrelated to the novel since François's grandfather is retired forester" who wears "a huge hooded cloak of grey wool and a rabbit-fur cap that he called his képi.")
The brick house draped with Virginia creepers in which Alain-Fournier was born is nicely kept up by private owners in La Chapelle-d'Angillon, but it cannot be visited. The museum is, instead, located in the Château de Béthune, on the outskirts of the town, and if you wish you can always imagine this medieval edifice as being the castle in and around which the strange fête takes place. Its candidacy is best suggested by the front façade, which looks out on a lake recalling the one on which Meaulnes rides in the same boat as Yvonne. Other nearby châteaux (such as the Château de Cornançay) have been proposed, as has the Abbaye de Loroy. But the problem of attributing a single historic building to the fictional château of the fête becomes unsolvable once one closely examines Alain-Fournier's descriptions. In one passage, for example, he depicts Meaulnes (during the fête) as following an "odd little person" who leads him to "a heavy wooden door, arched at the top and studded like the door of a presbytery." Specialists of Alain-Fournier's work believe that this door is that of the "Public Notary's House" in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel. This means that the author, painstakingly accurate when describing the architecture and appurtenances of the Sainte-Agathe schoolhouse (however much he, while retrospecting, "enlarges" the apartment rooms, the classrooms, and the courtyard), draws a vaguer, appropriately "dreamier," more composite picture of the château. Both the "enlarging" and the vagueness are, of course, typical of any adult trying to conjure up the emotionally charged settings of his childhood.
My own intuition was that no château corresponding to that of the strange fête was to be found near La Chapelle-d'Angillon, or anywhere else for that matter—except, perhaps, a château which we (like Meaulnes) might carry around in our own minds. Meaulnes repeatedly tells François and the other boys about his "lost domain"; he proclaims its existence. In our cases, perhaps we keep our secret castles to ourselves, perhaps we even hold on to them unknowingly. It was thus not the Château de Béthune as such which particularly stirred me during our pilgrimage, nor even the Alain-Fournier museum housed therein (which consists mainly of photographs and photographically reproduced documents), but rather a few details and one amusing incident that perpetuated the "Grand-Meaulnes ambience" in which we had been enveloped ever since our stopover at that nameless café in Theillay.
The first notable detail adding to the "Grand-Meaulnes ambience" was simply a blue mailbox outside the museum ticket office. A mailbox is an insignificant everyday object for most people, but this one represented one of the probably three or four remaining specimens displaying that particular hue of blue that once graced all French mailboxes, before they were systematically painted yellow. The mailbox in front of the Alain-Fournier museum had been overlooked by the postal inspectors and their painters. I had known about the original color from one of my favorite books, Affranchissons-nous (1990), by Jacques Réda, who reports (in my translation) that this blue
The subtle blue over which a sickly yellow had been smeared everywhere else in France shined forth here in homage to Alain-Fournier's own sharply and tenderly chosen details ("the oilcloth on the table, the cold wine in the glasses, the red tiles beneath our feet"), even as—a few minutes later—an enormous black Labrador named Ulysses who was barking at us from his position high above on the main gate (his muzzle was visible through one of the machicolations) maintained a surreal atmosphere as we were led forward on a guided tour.
Our sole companions on this guided tour consisted of a Dutch family made up of, coincidentally, two rather late-parents like ourselves and their daughter, who was a year younger than Justin but taller (and Justin is very tall for his age). Her name was Katinka. In a short while, we entered a vast room housing an exhibit of Albanian embroidered crafts, engraved sabers, begemmed hookahs, and other folkloric artifacts—an initially incongruous setting for the seeker of Alain-Fournier memorabilia yet one which, upon reflection, logically set forth the strange fête. Justin and Katinka (and the rest of us) were each invited to pick up a pair of felt slippers (from a heap in the corner) and to slip them over our shoes so that the waxed wooden floor would not be damaged by our strolling.
Ice skating comes naturally to the Dutch, and our little Justin had already practiced this sport several times on the Angers indoor rink. Justin and Katinka, who had no language in common, soon were skating hand-in-hand through the Albanian exhibit together, swerving flawlessly around display cases, nearly (but not quite) grazing the priceless tapestries on the walls, coming to slippery skidding stops together in the middle of the room, and even tumbling down—to great giggles—a couple of times. The guide, a master's student in French heraldry, was indulgent. And, it must be said, our children were behaving reasonably well. It was a scorching hot early afternoon; we, like the Dutch family, had already driven far; here was a museum full of, not buttons to push and strange objects to take in hand, but rather dusty photographs and Albanian needlework. . . . And then, miraculously, the heap of felt slippers and the long slippery waxed floor. Both Justin and Katinka knew exactly how far they could go, with respect to their parents' patience, while spontaneously throwing their own strange fête.
As to Augustin Meaulnes, aged seventeen, he no longer has limits. His father is dead. So is his younger brother, Antoine, who—as we learn at the onset of the story—died one evening after swimming in an unhealthy pond with his brother on their way home from school. Augustin's well-to-do mother arranges for him to board with the Seurels, and then she returns to her home in "La Ferté-d'Angillon" (obviously La Chapelle-d'Angillon, another illustration of Alain-Fournier's sentimental geography). Augustin's first act is, indeed, of a mischievousness far surpassing Justin and Katinka's innocent skating: he takes forbidden fireworks from the schoolhouse attic, where they are stored for the Bastille Day celebrations. (One schoolhouse room functions as the town hall.) Down in the courtyard, Meaulnes boldly lights them in front of François's mother. "For a second she could see me standing in the magic glow," reminisces François, "holding the tall newcomer's hand and not flinching. . . . She did not dare to say anything."
Meaulnes's subsequent acts aspire to still greater freedoms, and François will participate in some of them, at least in his imagination and not without an ambiguous consent. "Before he came," he confesses,
By six o'clock that afternoon, we had left the first Alain-Fournier Museum, driven down tollway A-71 to the No. 9 turnoff, from which we backtracked up national highway N-144 a few miles and entered Vallon-en-Sully. Before showing up at our gîte in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, a bed-and-breakfast-like arrangement that we had reserved in none other than the Public Notary's House, we needed to buy tomatoes, a few slices of ham, goat's cheese and peaches for our picnic that evening. Quite conveniently, the parking lot of the small Shopi supermarket in Vallon-en-Sully offers a superb view of the train station—which, as I have specified, is surely "La Gare" of the novel. Except for some bright-orange plastic fencing marking off a small construction site, and one modern SNCF sign indicating that the depot is property of the French national railroad system (a nationalized monopoly that did not exist in Alain-Fournier's time), nothing really has changed since the day when François's maternal grandparents stepped off the train. Everything was calm. Only one stroller—an elderly man wearing white shorts and a white T-shirt—was visible.
Then, while I was waiting for Françoise and Justin to come out of the Shopi, a two-car blue-and-black train—the diesel-oil-burning and smoke-bellowing kind from the 1960s called a Micheline—came ostentatiously chugging to a halt. A few passengers got off and I daydreamed that a child I spotted on the platform could have been, some forty years before, Patrick Drevet, whose memoir La Micheline (1990; English translation: My Micheline, Quartet, 1993) probably best perpetuates, among other contemporary French novels devoted to childhood, the spirit of Alain-Fournier. In Drevet, the secret, emotionally charged "place" favored by his reminiscence is not an attic room or a schoolyard, but rather a window seat in a slowly progressing Micheline taking him to his maternal grandparents' faraway home. Arrival is, in this sense, long postponed (recalling the way in which the fulfillment of Meaulnes's dream is also, consciously, relegated to an unattainable future). In contrast to the author of Le GrandMeaulnes, however, Drevet seems to hope, through writing, to recover a supposedly pristine state in which a young child's access to the totality of the sentient world is more or less immediate. In both writers, the worm is already in the apple by adolescence, a point that needs to be taken into account by any reader initially qualifying these novels as "nostalgic."
It was impossible not to recall how, after François brings his grandparents back to Sainte-Agathe, they sit in front of the high fireplace and begin "a detailed account of everything that had happened to them since the last holidays"—a narrative to which François soon no longer listens because he is wondering what has happened to Meaulnes, who has inexplicably vanished. (He is in the process of getting lost in the woods.) As for myself, during our pilgrimage, I was increasingly finding it impossible to follow the ongoing narrative of the "objective" present because the objective present was passing with increasing frequency through the filter of Alain-Fournier's novel. With all its engaging emotions and overall genuineness, Le Grand Meaulnes is particularly suited to this kind of filtered perceiving and self-directed daydreaming. The sharply-etched settings and scenes of the novel tend to impregnate the brute reality in your midst, until you no longer can distinguish the one from the other.
At last we arrived in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, driving—with a tremor of excitement—right by the schoolhouse, scarcely not a detail of which has changed: "a long red building at the far end of the village, draped with Virginia creepers, and with five glazed doors opening onto an immense courtyard used as a playground and partly roofed over for shelter in bad weather." Not far down the surprisingly wide and rather naked main street is the Public Notary's House, locally known as "La Grande Maison." Several other extant buildings or houses in the village are mentioned—or at least seem to be so—in the novel, and at the local tourist office you can obtain a map enabling you to take a walking tour of all these landmarks. Yet, as has already been suggested, the novel endures in unanticipated places, often on the periphery of the actual sites. In the deepest sense, the novel endures within our own retrospective childhoods, as do other contemporaneous French classics, such as Marcel Proust's Du Côté de chez Swann (1913) and Colette's Claudine à l' école (1900), La Maison de Claudine (1922), and Le Blé en herbe (1923), which examine so profoundly the passing from childhood into adolescence, and then from adolescence into rationalizing, dream-destroying adulthood. La Gare becomes the distant train whistles that I could hear late in the evening, from my bedroom in Des Moines, circa 1957. I was five years old. Then the tracks running up Urbandale Avenue were removed and the nights thereafter remained dark and ominously hushed.
Without at first explaining why, the owners of the gîte at the Public Notary's House seemed reticent about our using one of their backyard tables for our picnic dinner. (As it turned out, they had invited friends over for a garden party.) So we squeezed back into our over-packed 205 and returned to Vallon-en-Sully, where we had spotted a municipal park with picnic tables and benches. We set out our provisions on a table, began cutting into a baguette and making ham sandwiches; then, without warning (and rather in the way that Meaulnes descends from the attic), a small girl was suddenly standing, yes, on our table. Her name was Léa, she was four years old, she lived in the Parisian suburbs, she was on vacation at her grandparents' house, and she called us "Les Voyageurs." "Qu'est-ce que vousfaites, les voyageurs?" she inquired. "What are you doing, travelers?" Justin smiled timidly, his cheeks flushed a little, and he looked up at his mother. "Another Grand-Meaulnes ambience," he sighed.
In a moment Léa's older sister Lali arrived on her bicycle, and I wondered if we were caught up, not so much in the strange fête of Le Grand Meaulnes, but rather in one of those post-Beckettian plays by young French writers who create absurd characters whose phonetically punning names chime bizarrely together. Léa and Lali. The two girls dallied around us, making it impossible for us to continue eating, prodding Justin with questions that he didn't want to answer, going on about the local Bastille Day fireworks show, at which they had marveled two nights previously. At the same time, on a fire-truck parked nearby, a banner announced "POMPIERS EN GREVE,"which means "FIREMEN ON STRIKE." This, too, was a mystery, for in France the local firemen usually put on the fireworks display. Had Meaulnes himself descended from some attic and lit the fireworks fuses?
Eventually Léa and Lali were called inside by an invisible grandmother behind a stone wall. We finished our picnic, drove back to Épineuil-le-Fleuriel and the Public Notary's House. Avoiding the garden party, we slipped inside the stolid old house, found ourselves (like Meaulnes during the strange fête) in a "dark passage"; then, also rather like him (who was "dazzled and unsteady on his feet, afraid of being discovered"), we cautiously climbed a narrow spiral stone staircase and, not finding the hall light, groped our way to a heavily curtained room with exposed dark-brown ceiling beams. Between the beams the ceiling was bright red. We fell fast asleep (the beds were as comfortable as the owners had claimed), awakening early the next morning when the river swallows started squeaking through the brisk air, pursuing mosquitoes. Our breakfast was delicious: fresh bread and homemade rhubarb jam.
At the schoolhouse, we had the good fortune to have as our private guide Mme. Lullier, who herself was not only the local schoolteacher (now retired) of the village but who had also taught her classes in the very room in which young Henri Fournier had sat. Now the building is a museum full of moving schoolboy objects from the beginning of the century. To the right of the courtyard gate as one enters, for instance, a hooded schoolboy's cloak (a pèlerine) hangs on a peg under the préau, the roof-like structure under which François and his classmates gathered in Le Grand Meaulnes—even as children still gather today under préaux in schoolyards everywhere in France whenever it rains during recess. It wasn't raining when we visited the school that morning, and as we were listening to Mme. Lullier's precise and respectful commentary, a green lizard basking in the slanting morning sunrays awoke and darted across the red tiles of the préau rooftop. Mme. Lullier was explaining that the préau roof in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel had been built especially low so that the gusts of wind—typical in this village—would not blow the hooded cloaks off the pegs.
It was also windless, but Alain-Fournier surged like a jinni right out of that imaginary gust (he describes the village road as "still shining wet but now drying in a rough wind"), and it was thereafter as if the close-lipped, memory-haunted, starry-eyed author accompanied us invisibly as we visited the two classrooms (there was only one large one in his day), examining the same grammar books that Monsieur Fournier senior had used when teaching him to write. One of the dictation sentences, with its "r's" and "l's," was a tongue-twister: "La grêle fera périr le blé." School records reveal that Alain-Fournier permutated the names of his classmates so as to slightly fictionalize his characters. A few of them have comic surnames (Delouche, Dutremblay, Moucheboeuf) and one of them (Fromentin) pays discreet homage to Eugène Fromentin's Dominique (1863), a novel about tragic, unrequited love that influenced Le Grand Meaulnes. Befittingly, the adult author used schoolboy notebooks in which to write the first draft of his novel. In a letter to his family, he described himself as being "taciturn, profound, useless."
Mme. Lullier knows Le Grand Meaulnes by heart, and we spent nearly the entire morning slowly moving amidst a multitude of fine revelatory details, in the schoolhouse, its adjoining appartement de fonction, and of course the attic. Alain-Fournier describes for example—and rather oddly, since the village is located so far inland—the classroom as smelling of "grilled herrings, and of the singed wool of boys' clothes as they warmed themselves too closely by the stove." The singed wool is comprehensible (and the same stove is still extant), but the grilled herring? As it turns out, the schoolboys, many of whom came from distant farms, would not return home for lunch but would instead stay in school and heat up pickled herring on the stove. Hence the historic justification of this unusual stench so lovingly memoralized by Alain-Fournier. We had believed him, anyway, of course. Rarely is an author able to win so quickly, and to maintain till the very end of his tale, the unquestioning complicity of his readers.
After a while, Justin began getting restless with all these objects and details from a bygone era (however unsettingly contemporary, and charged with Alain-Fournier's unique magnetism, they were for us). He started tugging at my shirt, begging us to leave, to take him to his grandfather's house in the Alps. Justin's French grandfather had been laying shrub cuttings aside, he had promised, and arriving at Papy's house thus meant being able to light a huge bonfire—something we could not do in Angers since we live in an apartment. Lighting that bonfire, for a boy of seven, was a hope no less intense than Meaulnes's dream of rediscovering the Lost Domain.
So it was time to bade Alain-Fournier good-bye, to bade Mme. Lullier good-bye. And it was time for all of us to recover the present, as best we could. After this prolonged detour through the sentimental geography of Alain-Fournier, which in our minds had at times whirlwinded into a vortex of swirling, intersecting childhoods (Alain-Fournier's, François Seurel's, Augustin Meaulnes's, our own), we finally drove out of the village of Épineuil-le-Fleuriel, ate a quick lunch on a back road, then took a series of country highways enabling us to join the tollway. We set our sights on the faraway Alps. Late in the afternoon, as we were skirting around Lyons, Justin fell asleep in the back seat. Another hour or so of driving went by, and he awoke just as we were pulling into the gravel lane. Will this lane, the Chemin de la Croix-Sollière, with its mysterious name evocative of some primitive Christian solar rite, with the crunching sound of its tiny pebbles, with the cathedral-like canopy formed by its overgrown bordering trees, become one of the secret places of Justin's own retrospective childhood? Will anything remain in his memory of our trip through the land of Alain-Fournier and Le Grand Meaulnes? The ice-skating in the Albanian exhibit? These are not questions his parents can answer. The evening was upon us. And there was Justin's Papy, already waiting for him in the lane, a bundle of old Dauphiné Libéré newspapers under one arm and a box of matches in his hand.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes or The Lost Domain, and Miracles, translated respectively by R. B. Russell and Adrian Eckersley (Horam, East Sussex, Great Britain, 1999). (Distributed in the United States by Firebird Distribution, 1945, P. Street, Eureka, California 95501.) Quotations in this essay are taken from this, the most recent and vivid English-language translation.
Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes / Miracles (Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1986). This edition includes Jacques Rivière's penetrating essay, "Alain-Fournier."
Alain-Fournier, Colombe Blanchet: esquisses d'un second roman, ed. Gabriella Manca (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1990).
Alain-Fournier, Chroniques et critiques, ed. André Guyon (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1991).
John Fowles, "The Lost Domaine of Alain-Fournier," in Wormholes: Essays andOccasional Writings (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998).
