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Penguin
0141182725
£7.99
The translator, Frank Davison, footnotes the eponymous hero:
'No English adjective will convey all the shades of meaning that can be read into the simple word grand which takes on overtones as the story progresses. Le grand Meaulnes can mean the tall, the big, the protective, the almost-grown-up, even the great Meaulnes - or in schoolboy parlance, good old Meaulnes. But when the book has been put down, the phrase evokes in retrospect the image of someone not only tall or big but also daring, noble, tragic, fabulous. It is a phrase which has acquired a patina, for since its use as the title of a book which cast a spell over a whole generation of French readers, it enjoys the sort of nostalgic prestige, not untinged with affection, that one associates with familiar quotations.'
(Quotations, perhaps, such as ''Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.')
Augustin Meaulnes, for the French, is grand in the way Jay Gatsby is Great for the Americans.
There are other similarities between these two novels. Both are romantic in the strictest sense of that word, going all the way back to the Medieval French poem The Romance of the Rose. (Despite their not wearing armour, Meaulnes and Gatsby are unmistakably Knights errant.) Both are, therefore, obsessed with time and its terrible passing - what treasures it steals away, what trash it dumps. (The rose itself is emblem of transiently flourishing but transcendently memorable beauty.) Also, both find and lose themselves during a fantastic party in the grounds of a magnificent castle. (This is what carnival is for.)
Meaulnes, playing truant from school, gets lost, gets more lost, and finally stumbles - in the dark of night - upon a twinkling chateau, where the children seem magically to be in charge. Preparations are taking place for a wedding party - the young son of the house will be returning with his beautiful bride the very next day. In the meantime, there are costumes to be worn, entertainments to be rehearsed, feasts to be eaten. Meaulnes puts on a disguise and joins the other guests.
The following morning, a boat trip is planned. Meaulnes, curious, goes along - and it is here that he, for a painfully brief moment, encounters Yvonne de Galais, the daughter of the house.
'He came up with her before he had given himself time to reflect and said simply:
"You are beautiful."'
But Frantz de Galais, the son of the house, arrives back that evening distraught, without his bride. The enchanted wedding party breaks up - and Meaulnes, hurried along with the departing guests, leaves the chateau just as he entered it, in darkness and confusion.
Back in the humdrum world of a rural school, Meaulnes becomes obsessed with getting back to the lost domain. He makes plans all through the winter, drawing maps based on his hopeful memories.
(Paraphrase, as usual, is here killing the thing it intends to bring to life. Apologies.)
'But can the past ever be revived?'
'Who knows?' said Meaulnes, thoughtfully. And he asked no more questions.
All of this is observed by Mealnes' friend and, increasingly, confidante, Francois Seurel, son of the schoolmaster. He is the enthralled and trying-not-to-be-murderously-envious narrator, as Nick Carraway is of The Great Gatsby.
One of the possibilities of the novel form that both Fitzgerald and Alain-Fournier exploit is the nostalgia that a reader, coming towards the final pages, can be made to feel towards earlier episodes in the book. (Proust is one of the masters of this.)
And so Le Grand Meaulnes' yearning for Yvonne and the world of the lost domain is a yearning shared by and in some ways increased by the reader's own yearning for those fleeting passages of the book.
It is a domain that, as things turned out, was to be doubly lost. Le Grand Meaulnes was published in 1912. Within two years, Alain-Fournier was killed in action on the Meuse. He did not get the chance to write a better novel; it is hard to imagine how he could have written a more loveable one.
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