The Lost Estate (15 page)

The ringmaster joined his companion behind the curtain hiding the caravan door. Everyone went back to his or her seat,
thinking that the second part of the show was going to start right away, and silence fell. Then, while the last whispered conversations were dying away, the sound of an argument came from behind the curtain. We could not hear every word that was being said, but we recognized the two voices: those of the big lad and the young man, the first explaining and justifying himself, the other rebuking him, with a mixture of sadness and indignation. ‘But, you idiot,’ he was saying, ‘why didn’t you tell me?’

The rest could not be made out, even though every ear was strained. Then suddenly all went quiet. The row continued in low voices and the kids on the upper rows started to shout, ‘Lights! Curtain!’ and stamp their feet.

VII

THE GYPSY TAKES OFF HIS BANDAGE

At last, slowly, between the curtains slid the face – wrinkled, beaming now with merriment, now with anguish, and dotted with sealing wafers – of a tall pierrot in three badly jointed pieces, bent over as though suffering from colic and walking on tiptoe, as from exaggerated caution or fear, with his hands entangled in excessively long sleeves which dragged along the ground.

I’m at a loss today to reconstruct the story of his pantomime; all I remember is that, as soon as he arrived in the ring, after hopelessly, desperately trying to keep his balance, he fell over. He got up again, but it was no good: he fell over. He was constantly falling. He managed to get caught up in four chairs at once. As he fell, he took with him a huge table that they had brought into the arena. In the end, he fell right over the barrier round the ring and at the feet of the spectators. Two assistants, recruited with much difficulty from the audience, set him upright again after an unbelievable struggle. And every time, as he fell, he gave a little cry, different every time, an unbearable little cry, in which distress and satisfaction were equally mixed. At the climax of the act, climbing on a heap of chairs, he made a tremendous, very slow fall, and his shrill, agonized wail of triumph lasted as long as the fall did, accompanied by gasps of terror from the women in the audience.

In the second part of his pantomime, I remember (though I don’t quite know why) seeing the ‘poor falling clown’ taking a little doll, stuffed with bran, out of one of his sleeves and miming a whole tragi-comic drama with her. In the end, he made all the bran that was inside her emerge from her mouth.
Then, with doleful little cries, he filled her up again with porridge and, at the moment of greatest concentration, when all the spectators were watching open-mouthed and all eyes were on the poor pierrot’s slimy, tattered little doll, he suddenly grasped her in one hand and threw her with all his strength into the audience towards the face of Jasmin Delouche – she brushed damply past his ear and crashed into Madame Pignot, just below the chin. The baker’s wife gave such a shout and flung herself back so hard that all the people around her did the same, breaking the bench, with the result that the baker’s wife, Fernande, sad Widow Delouche and twenty or so others collapsed, with their legs in the air, amid a burst of laughter, shouts and clapping, while the tall clown, who had fallen face downwards on the ground, got up, bowed and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have the honour to thank you!’

But at that very moment, in the midst of this huge uproar, The Great Meaulnes, who had not said a word since the start of the pantomime and seemed constantly more preoccupied as it went on, suddenly stood up, grasped my arm and, as though unable to contain himself, cried, ‘Look at the gypsy! Look! At last, I know who he is!’

Without even a glance, as though the thought had long been hatching inside me, unconsciously, and had only been waiting for that moment to emerge from its shell, I guessed what he meant. Standing by a lantern at the door of the caravan, the young unknown person had undone his bandage and thrown a cloak over his shoulders. There he was, in the smoky light, as he had once been in the candlelight in the room at the château, with his fine, aquiline, clean-shaven face. He was pale, with half-open lips and hastily leafing through a sort of little, red-bound book that must have been a pocket atlas. Apart from a scar across his temple, disappearing under the mass of hair, he was just as The Great Meaulnes had minutely described him to me: the fiancé from the Strange Estate.

It was clear that he had taken off his bandage so that we would recognize him. But no sooner had The Great Meaulnes leapt up and let out that cry than the young man went back
into the caravan, after giving us a complicit look and smiling, in his usual way, with a kind of melancholy.

‘And the other one!’ Meaulnes said urgently. ‘Why didn’t I recognize him straightaway! He was the pierrot from there, from the fête…’

He started to go down the rows towards him. But Ganache had already closed all the entrances to the ring. One by one, he was turning off the four circus lights, and we were forced to follow the crowd as it made its way out, very slowly, channelled between the parallel benches, while we were stamping our feet with impatience in the gloom.

As soon as he was outside, at last, The Great Meaulnes dashed towards the caravan, rushed up the steps and knocked on the door. But everything was already shut. No doubt, in the caravan with its curtains, as in the cart belonging to the pony, the goat and the performing birds, everyone was already gathered in and starting to sleep.

VIII

THE GENDARMES!

We had to join up with the crowd of men and women making their way back towards the school through the dark streets. Now we understood everything. The tall white figure that Meaulnes had seen on the last evening of the celebration running between the trees was Ganache, who had picked up the heartbroken fiancé and fled with him. Frantz de Galais had accepted this wild life full of risks, games and adventures. It was like going back to his childhood…

Up to now, he had kept his name from us and pretended not to know the way back to the estate, no doubt because he was afraid that he would be forced to return to his parents. But why had he suddenly seen fit that evening to make himself known to us and to let us guess the whole truth?

How many plans The Great Meaulnes was making as the crowd of spectators slowly dispersed around the town. He decided that he would go and look for Frantz the very next morning, which was a Thursday. Then the two of them would set off for
there!
What a journey it would be on the wet road. Frantz would explain everything, it would all be settled, and the wonderful adventure would start again at the point where it had been broken off…

For my part, I was walking through the darkness with a vague weight pressing on my heart. Everything was combining to make me happy, from the small pleasure that I gained from anticipating the Thursday holiday to the immense discovery that we had just made by some astonishing piece of luck. And I remember that, with this sudden feeling of generosity in my heart, I went over to the ugliest of the notary’s daughters – the
one to whom, as a punishment, I was sometimes required to offer my arm – and spontaneously took her hand.

Bitter memories! Vain hopes crushed!

The next day, at eight o’clock, as the two of us came into the church square, with our brightly shining shoes, our well-polished belt buckles and our new caps, Meaulnes – who up to then had been trying not to smile when he looked at me – gave a shout and started to run into the empty square… In the place where the tent and the caravan had been, only a broken pot and some rags remained… The gypsies had gone.

A little wind, which seemed icy to us, was blowing. I felt as though with every step we took we would trip up on the hard, stony ground of the square and fall over. Twice, Meaulnes made as though to run, firstly along the road to Le Vieux-Nançay, then along the road to Saint-Loup-des-Bois. He shaded his eyes with his hand, hoping for a moment that they had only just left. What could we do? There were the tracks of ten carts crisscrossing the square, then vanishing on the hard surface of the road. There was nothing for it but to stand there, helpless.

And while we were going back through the village, where Thursday morning was beginning, four mounted gendarmes, who had been alerted by Delouche the previous evening, galloped into the square and deployed themselves around it to seal off every entrance, like dragoons reconnoitring a village. But it was too late. Ganache, the chicken thief, had fled with his friend. The gendarmes found no one: neither Ganache nor the person who had loaded the wagons with the chickens that he had strangled. Informed by Jasmin’s rash but timely remark, Frantz must have learnt suddenly how his friend and he managed to survive when the moneybox in the caravan was empty. Filled with shame and fury, he must have immediately drawn up an itinerary and decided to hurry away before the arrival of the gendarmes. But now, when his only fear was that they would try to take him back to his father’s home, he wanted to show himself to us without his bandage before he vanished.

Only one thing remained unclear: how had Ganache managed to rob the farmyards and fetch a nursing sister to treat his
friend’s high temperature? But wasn’t that just typical of the poor devil? A thief and vagrant on the one hand and a good companion on the other…

IX

IN SEARCH OF THE LOST PATH

On our way back, the sun was clearing the light mist of morning, the housewives on the porches of their homes were shaking carpets or chatting and, in the fields and woods on the outskirts of the little town, the most radiant spring morning I can remember in my life was just beginning.

All the older pupils in the school were to come in at around eight o’clock that Thursday, so that some could spend the morning preparing for the Certificat d’études supérieures and others the examination for the Ecole Normale.
¹¹
When the two of us reached the school – Meaulnes so full of agitation and regret that he could not keep still and I feeling very downcast – the place was empty. A ray of fresh sunshine was glancing off the dust on a worm-holed bench and on the chipped varnish of a planisphere.

How could we stay there, poring over our books and thinking about our disappointment, when everything was calling us outside: the birds chasing one another through the branches by the window, the other pupils escaping to the woods and meadows, and most of all the urgent need as soon as possible to try out the partial itinerary that the gypsy had checked – the last item in our almost empty bag, the last key on the ring when all the rest had been tried? It was more than we could resist! Meaulnes strode up and down, went over to the windows, looked into the garden, then came back and looked towards the town as though waiting for someone who would surely not come.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said at last. ‘It occurs to me that it may perhaps not be as far as we think… Frantz has cut out a whole part of the route that I showed on my plan. That suggests that
the mare could have made a long detour while I was asleep…’

I was half seated on the corner of a large table with one foot on the ground and the other dangling, my head bent and with an air of listlessness and discouragement.

‘But on the way back,’ I pointed out, ‘your journey in the berlin lasted all night.’

‘We set out at midnight,’ he said eagerly. ‘He put me down at four in the morning, around six kilometres to the west of Sainte-Agathe – while I had started from the station road in the east. So we have to subtract those six kilometres between Sainte-Agathe and the Lost Land. Honestly, I think that once we’re through the Bois des Communaux, then we can’t be more than two leagues from the place we’re looking for.’

‘And those are precisely the two leagues missing from your map.’

‘That’s right. And the far end of the Bois is a good league and a half from here, but for a fast walker, it could be done in a morning.’

At that moment, Moucheboeuf arrived. He had an annoying habit of appearing to be a good pupil, not by working any harder than the rest, but by getting himself noticed at times like these.

‘I knew it!’ he said, triumphantly. ‘I knew you’d be the only ones who’d be here. All the others have gone to the Bois des Communaux – with Jasmin Delouche leading, because he knows where to find the nests.’

And, in his holier-than-thou way, he started to tell us everything that they had said, making fun of the school, Monsieur Seurel and us, as they were planning the expedition.

‘If they’re in the woods, I expect I’ll see them on my way,’ said Meaulnes. ‘Because I’m going there myself. I’ll be back around half-past twelve.’

Moucheboeuf was speechless.

‘Aren’t you coming?’ Augustin asked me, pausing for a moment at the half-open door, allowing a gust of air warm from the sun to sweep into the grey classroom accompanied by a medley of cries, shouts and birdsong, the sound of a bucket on the lip of a well and the distant crack of a whip.

‘No,’ I said, though I was sorely tempted. ‘I can’t, because of Monsieur Seurel. But hurry back, I’ll be waiting for you.’

He made a vague gesture and left, hurriedly, full of hope.

When Monsieur Seurel arrived, at around ten o’clock, he had exchanged his black alpaca jacket for a fisherman’s coat with huge buttoned pockets, a straw hat and short, shiny gaiters holding the bottom of his trousers. I think he was not at all surprised to find no one there and he paid no attention to Moucheboeuf, who told him three times what the boys had said: ‘If he needs us, let him come and fetch us!’

Instead he ordered: ‘Put away your things, get your caps and we’ll comb the woods for them ourselves… will you be able to walk that far, François?’

I said I could, and we set off.

It was agreed that Moucheboeuf would guide Monsieur Seurel and act as decoy… That is, since he knew the woodland where the nest-hunters would be operating, he could shout out loudly from time to time, ‘Hey! Hello! Giraudat! Delouche! Where are you? Are there any? Have you found some?’