The Lost Estate (11 page)

There was a continual coming and going from this great kitchen-dining room to the upper rooms and the stables. Those who had finished eating formed groups saying goodbye.

‘What’s happening?’ Meaulnes asked a country boy who was hastily finishing his meal, with his felt hat on his head and his napkin tucked into his waistcoat.

‘We’re off,’ he replied. ‘It was all decided quite suddenly. At five o’clock there we were, by ourselves, all the guests together. We had waited until the very last moment. The engaged couple couldn’t be coming. Someone said: “Why don’t we go?” So everyone got ready to leave.’

Meaulnes said nothing. He might as well go himself now. Hadn’t he followed his adventure to the end? Hadn’t he now got everything that he wanted? He had barely had time at leisure to go over in his mind the whole lovely conversation of the morning. Now, there was nothing left except to go. And he would soon be back, this time not under false pretences…

‘If you want to come with us,’ said the boy, who was about
Meaulnes’ age, ‘hurry up and get ready. We’re going to harness the horses in a moment.’

He left at full speed, leaving the remains of the meal that he had started to eat, and forgetting to tell the guests what he knew. The park, the garden and the courtyard were plunged in darkness. There were no lanterns at the windows that evening. But since, after all, this dinner was rather like the last meal at the end of a wedding, the less worthy of the guests, who may have been drinking, had begun to sing. As he went off, he heard their cabaret songs rising up across the park that in the past two days had contained so much elegance and so many wonders. And this was where disorder and devastation began. He passed close by the fish pond where he had looked at his reflection that morning. How everything seemed changed already… with the song, chanted in unison, which reached him in snatches:

Where are you coming from, my libertine?

Your hat is all torn

And your hair’s all awry…

And this other one, as well:

My shoes are red…

Goodbye, my lover…

My shoes are red…

Goodbye for ever!

As he was arriving at the foot of the staircase in his isolated apartment, someone coming down bumped into him in the dark and said: ‘Farewell, Monsieur!’ And, wrapping himself in his cape as though he was feeling very cold, he vanished. It was Frantz de Galais.

The candle that Frantz had left in his room was still burning. Nothing had been disturbed. However, on a piece of writing paper left in a prominent place, these words were written:

My fiancée has disappeared, letting me know that she could not be my wife, that she was a dressmaker and not a princess. I do not know what will become of me. I am going away. I do not wish to live any longer. May Yvonne forgive me if I do not say farewell to her, but there is nothing that she could do for me…

The candle was burning out: its flame flickered, flared up for a moment and died. Meaulnes went back to his own room and closed the door. Despite the darkness, he recognized all the things that he had arranged a few hours earlier, in the fullness of daylight and of happiness. Item by item, he found all his shabby old clothes, old friends, from his worn boots to his coarse belt with its brass buckle. He got undressed and dressed again briskly, and put his borrowed clothes to one side on a chair, absent-mindedly taking the wrong waistcoat…

A commotion had arisen under the windows in the yard with the carriages. There was pulling, shouting, pushing, everyone trying to extricate his carriage from the impossible jam in which they were caught. From time to time, a man climbed on to the seat of a cart or the roof of a coach and swung round his lantern. The beam of this light would strike the window and for a moment the room around Meaulnes became familiar: the room in which everything had seemed so friendly to him throbbed and lived again… And so it was that, carefully closing the door behind him, he left that mysterious place, which he would surely never see again…

XVII

THE STRANGE FETE

(end)

Already a line of carriages was moving slowly through the night towards the gate on the forest side. At its head, a man wearing a goat’s skin, with a lantern in his hand, was leading the first of the horses by its bridle.

Meaulnes was in a hurry to find someone willing to take him along. He was in a hurry to leave. Deep inside him, he was worried that he might find himself alone on the estate and his deception be revealed.

When he arrived in front of the main building, the drivers were balancing the loads on the final carriages. All the travellers were being asked to get up so that the seats could be put closer together or moved back, and the girls, wrapped in their shawls, were finding it awkward to stand: blankets were slipping to the ground and you could see the worried faces of those bending their heads on the side with the lamps.

Meaulnes recognized one of the drivers as the young peasant who had recently offered to take him.

‘Can I get up?’ he shouted.

‘Where are you going, my lad?’ the other boy asked, no longer recognizing him.

‘Towards Sainte-Agathe.’

‘Then you want to ask Maritain to take you.’

So now the schoolboy was having to look for this unknown Maritain among the last to leave. He was pointed out to him among the drinkers singing in the kitchen.

‘He’s a merrymaker,’ Meaulnes was told. ‘He’ll still be there at three in the morning.’

For a moment, Meaulnes thought about the anxious young
woman, feverish and distressed, who would have to listen to these ebrious peasants singing in the château into the middle of the night. Which rooms was she in? Among these mysterious buildings, which was her window? But there was no sense in him waiting; he had to leave. Once he was back in Sainte-Agathe, everything would become clearer. He would no longer be a runaway schoolboy. He could once more think about the young lady of the manor.

One by one, the carriages set off, their wheels grating on the gravel in the main drive. And, through the dark, you could see them turn and vanish, laden with women wrapped against the cold and with children in shawls, already falling asleep. Another big wagon, then a charabanc in which the women were pressed shoulder to shoulder, went by, leaving Meaulnes disconcerted on the threshold of the house. Soon, all that would be left was an old berlin driven by a peasant in a smock.

‘You can climb aboard,’ he replied, when Augustin asked. ‘We’re going in that direction.’

Meaulnes struggled to open the door of the antique conveyance, its windows rattling and its hinges creaking. On the seat, in one corner of the carriage, were two quite small children, a boy and a girl, sleeping. They woke up with the noise and the cold air, stretched, looked vaguely around, then shuddered as they snuggled into their corner and went back to sleep.

The old vehicle was already on its way. Meaulnes shut the door quietly and cautiously took his place in the other corner, then, avidly, struggled to make out through the window the places that he was leaving and the route by which he had come. Despite the dark, he guessed that the carriage was crossing the courtyard and the garden, passing the stairway up to his room, going through the gate and leaving the estate to enter the wood. He could vaguely make out the trunks of the old fir trees as they flew past the window.

‘Perhaps we shall meet Frantz de Galais,’ he thought, with beating heart.

After a short while, in the narrow road, the carriage swung to one side to avoid an obstacle. As far as one could make out in the dark from its massive bulk, it was a caravan that had
halted almost in the middle of the road and must have stayed there for the past few days, close to the festivities.

Once this obstacle was out of the way, the horses set off at a trot. Meaulnes was starting to get tired of looking through the glass and trying in vain to see through the surrounding gloom when suddenly, in the depths of the wood, there was a flash, followed by the sound of a detonation. The horses set off at a gallop, and at first Meaulnes did not know if the coachman in the smock was attempting to hold them back or, on the contrary, urging them on. He tried to open the door. As the handle was on the outside, he made vain efforts to lower the window, shaking it… The children, waking up in a fright, pressed closer to one another, saying nothing. And while he was shaking the window, with his face pressed to the pane, thanks to a bend in the road, he noticed a white shape running along. It was the tall pierrot from the party, haggard and distraught, the gypsy in his carnival dress, carrying in his arms a human body, which he was holding against his chest. Then they vanished.

In the carriage driving at full gallop through the night, the two children had gone back to sleep. There was no one to whom he could talk about the mysterious events of the previous two days. After going over in his mind for a long time all that he had seen and heard, the young man, too, tired and heavy of heart, abandoned himself to sleep, like a sad child…

It was not yet dawn when Meaulnes was awakened, the carriage having stopped on the road, by someone knocking on the window. The driver struggled to get the door open and shouted, while the icy night wind was freezing the boy to the marrow of his bones: ‘You’ll have to get out here. Day is breaking. We’re going to turn off here. You’re quite close to Sainte-Agathe.’

Only half awake, Meaulnes did as he was told, groping mechanically for his hat, which had fallen under the feet of the two children sleeping in the darkest corner of the carriage. Then he bent over and got down.

‘Goodbye, then,’ said the man, getting back on to his seat. ‘You’ve only got six kilometres to walk. Look, there’s the distance stone, by the side of the road.’

Meaulnes, who was not yet fully awake, walked over, stooping and stumbling, as far as the stone and sat down on it, his arms crossed and head bent forward, as though preparing to go back to sleep…

‘No, no!’ the driver shouted. ‘You mustn’t go back to sleep there. It’s too cold. Come on, get up and walk a bit…’

Swaying like a drunken man, the tall boy, with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, set off slowly down the road to Sainte-Agathe. Meanwhile, the old berlin, a last link with the mysterious festivities, left the gravel road and silently jolted its way into the distance over the grass of the side road. All that could be seen was the driver’s hat, bouncing up and down above the hedgerows…

PART TWO

I

THE GREAT GAME

High winds and cold, rain and snow, and finding ourselves, Meaulnes and I, unable to undertake any lengthy search, meant that we did not speak again about the lost land before winter was over. We couldn’t start anything serious, in those short February days, those squally Thursdays
⁷
which would usually end at around five o’clock with dismal, icy rain.

Nothing reminded us of Meaulnes’ adventure except the peculiar fact that since the afternoon of his return we had no longer had any friends. In breaks from lessons, they organized the same games as before, but Jasmin never again spoke to The Great Meaulnes. In the evenings, as soon as the classroom had been swept out, the yard emptied as it used to when I was alone, and I saw my friend wander from the garden to the shed and from the yard to the dining room.

On Thursday mornings, sitting on the desk in one of the classrooms, we would each read works by Rousseau and Paul-Louis Courier
⁸
which we had found in the cupboards between English primers and music books, carefully copied out. In the afternoon, some visitor or other would force us out of the flat and back into the school… Sometimes, we would hear groups of older boys stop for a moment, as though by chance, in front of the main gate, crash against it while playing some incomprehensible war game and then go off. This sad existence continued until the end of February. I was starting to think that Meaulnes had forgotten it all, when an adventure happened, stranger than the rest, which proved to me that I had been wrong, and that a violent outburst was gathering beneath the dreary surface of our winter life.

It was actually one Thursday evening, around the end of the month, when the first news reached us of the Strange Estate, the first ripple from an adventure that we no longer mentioned. We had settled down for the evening. My grandparents had left, so only Millie and my father were there; and they had no idea of the secret feud that had divided the whole class into two tribes.

At eight o’clock, Millie opened the door to throw some crumbs from the table outside and said, ‘Oh!’ in such a loud voice that we went over to take a look. There was a blanket of snow on the doorstep… Since it was quite dark, I went a short way into the yard to see how deep it was. I felt the light flakes brushing against my face and melting as they did so. I was soon called back inside, and Millie shut the door, shivering.

At nine we were getting ready to go up to bed. My mother had already picked up the lamp, when we clearly heard two heavy knocks struck with full force against the gate at the far end of the yard. She put the lamp back on the table and we all stood there, waiting and listening.

There was no question of going to see what was up. Before we had crossed even half the yard, the lamp would have gone out and the glass shattered in the cold. There was a brief silence, and my father was starting to say, ‘It must have been…’, when, right under the window of the dining room (which, as I have said, overlooked the station road), there was a strident and very long whistle; it must have been audible as far as the road to the church. And, immediately outside the window, hardly muffled by its panes and made by people who must have hauled themselves up using the outside ledge, there was a series of piercing cries: ‘Bring him out! Bring him out!’