The Lost Estate (24 page)

When Mademoiselle de Galais came up to Meaulnes, she reminded me of those children, of one of those poor frightened children. I think that if all her friends, a whole village, a whole world had been looking at her, she would have run up even so
and fallen down in the same way, dishevelled, weeping and mud-stained.

But when she realized that Meaulnes was there and that this time, at least, he would not abandon her, she put her arm in his and then could not help laughing through her tears like a little child. Neither one of them said a word. But since she had taken out her handkerchief, Meaulnes gently took it from her hands and, carefully and methodically, wiped the blood from the young girl’s hair.

‘We must go back now,’ he said.

And I let them both go back, with the fine high wind of the winter evening lashing their faces – he reaching out his hand to help her over the rough ground, and she smiling and hastening with him towards the home that they had momentarily abandoned.

X

‘FRANTZ’S HOUSE’

Full of misgivings and vague anxieties that the fortunate outcome of the previous day’s turmoil was unable to dispel, I had to stay inside at school throughout the following day. As soon as the study period following the evening lesson arrived, I set out for Les Sablonnières. Night was falling when I reached the line of fir trees leading to the house. All the shutters were already closed. I was afraid that I would not be welcome at this late hour, on the day after a wedding. I stayed for a long time, wandering up and down on the outskirts of the garden and the surrounding fields, always hoping that I would see someone come out of the closed house. But my hopes were not realized. Even in the adjoining farm, nothing moved; so I had to go back home, with the darkest fears haunting my imagination.

There were the same worries on the following day, a Saturday. In the evening, I hastily took my cloak and stick, with a piece of bread to eat on my way, and I reached Les Sablonnières when night was already falling to find everything as it had been on the previous day. There was a glimmer of light on the first floor, but no sound or movement… However, this time, from the courtyard of the farm, I could see the farmhouse door open, with a fire lit in the great kitchen, and I could hear the sound of voices and footsteps that one might expect at supper time. I was reassured by this, but not better informed. I couldn’t say or ask anything of these people. So back I went again to watch and wait, in vain, still hoping that I would see the door open and Augustin’s tall figure emerge at last.

It was only on Sunday, in the afternoon, that I resolved to ring the doorbell of Les Sablonnières. While I was climbing the
bare hillsides, I could hear the bells ringing in the distance for winter Vespers. I felt lonely and abandoned. A sad but indefinable foreboding overcame me. I was only half surprised when, after I had rung the bell, Monsieur de Galais came to the door by himself, to whisper to me that Yvonne de Galais was in bed, with a high temperature, and that Meaulnes had had to leave that Friday morning on a long journey. They did not know when he would return…

Since the old man was very awkward and sad, and did not invite me inside, I left straightaway. As the door closed, I stood for a moment on the steps, with a heavy heart, utterly confused, watching – I don’t know why – a melancholy, dry wisteria branch swaying in a ray of sunlight.

So the secret regret that Meaulnes had been harbouring since his trip to Paris had proved too strong, and eventually my friend had fled the tight embrace of happiness…

Every Thursday and Sunday, I came to ask for news of Yvonne de Galais, until the evening when, finally convalescing, she asked for me to be invited in. I found her sitting by the fire in the drawing room with its large window overlooking the fields and woods. She was not pale, as I had imagined she would be, but on the contrary feverish, with bright red patches under her eyes and in an extremely nervous state. Although she still appeared very weak, she was dressed as though to go out. She said little, but enunciated every sentence with extraordinary emphasis, as though trying to persuade herself that her happiness had not yet faded… I can’t remember what we said, only that I eventually got round to asking, hesitantly, when Meaulnes would return.

‘I don’t know when he’ll come back,’ she said, quickly.

Her eyes were begging, and I was careful not to allude to it again.

I often went back to see her. I would often talk with her beside the fire in that low-ceilinged room, where night arrived sooner than elsewhere. She never talked about herself or her hidden sorrow, but also she never tired of hearing from me about the details of our life as schoolboys at Sainte-Agathe.

She listened gravely, tenderly, with almost maternal interest,
as I told her about our youthful trials and tribulations. She never seemed surprised, even at our most childish and most dangerous exploits. She had this attentive tenderness from Monsieur de Galais, and it had not been exhausted by the deplorable adventures of her brother. Her only regret about the past, I think, was that she had not been enough of a close friend for her brother to confide in, since he had not dared to say anything to her or to anyone else at the time of his great disaster, and had felt himself to be irretrievably lost. And, when I think about it, this was a heavy burden that the young woman had taken on – a perilous enterprise, supporting someone like her brother whose mind was full of extravagant fantasies, and an overwhelming one, when she was throwing in her lot with an adventurous heart like that of my friend Meaulnes…

One day, she gave me the most touching, I might even say the most mysterious, proof of the faith that she had in her brother’s childish dreams and the effort that she put into him keeping at least some traces of the dream that he had inhabited until he was twenty.

It was an April evening as desolate as one in late autumn. For nearly a month we had been enjoying a gentle, premature spring, and the young woman had gone back to taking the long walks that she loved, in the company of Monsieur de Galais. But on that day, as the old man felt tired and I was free, she asked me to go with her, despite the threat of rain. More than half a league from Les Sablonnières, as we were walking beside the pond, we were caught by a storm of rain and hail. We took refuge against the unending rainfall in a shelter where the wind chilled us as we stood next to one another, staring in silence at the dark landscape. I can see her, in her sweet, austerely simple dress, pale and anguished.

‘We must go back,’ she said. ‘We have been gone such a long time. Who knows what might have happened?’

But to my surprise, when we were finally able to leave our shelter, instead of going back towards Les Sablonnières, she continued to go forward and asked me to follow. After walking for a long time, we reached a house that I did not know,
standing alone beside a sunken lane that must have led towards Préveranges. It was a commonplace little house, with a slate roof, just like so many other ordinary houses in the region, except for its remoteness and isolation.

Seeing Yvonne de Galais, you would have thought that the house belonged to us and that we had left it while we were away on a long journey. Leaning forward, she opened a little gate, and anxiously hurried to look over the lonely place. A large, grass-covered yard, where children must have come to play in the long, slow evenings of late winter, had been ravaged by the storm. There was a hoop lying in a puddle. In the little plots where the children had sown flowers and peas, the heavy rain had left only trails of white gravel. And finally, huddled against the step of one damp door, we found a whole brood of rain-soaked chicks. Most of them had died beneath the stiffened wings and ruffled feathers of the mother hen.

The young woman stifled a cry at this piteous scene. She leant over and, without heeding the water or the mud, sorted the living chicks from the dead and put them in a fold of her coat. Then she unlocked the door, and we went into the house. Four doors opened on a narrow corridor, along which the wind howled. Yvonne de Galais opened the first one on our right and led me into a dark room in which, as my eyes adjusted to it, I managed to make out a large mirror and a little bed covered, in country style, with a red silk eiderdown. As for Yvonne, after briefly looking around the rest of the house, she came back with the ailing brood in a basket filled with down, which she cautiously pushed under the quilt. And while a lingering ray of sunlight, the first and last of the day, made our faces paler and made darker the coming of night, we stood there, chilled and uneasy in our minds, in that strange house!

From time to time, she went to look in the feverish nest and took out another dead chick to prevent it from killing the others. And each time, we felt that something like a great wind through the broken windows of the loft, like the mysterious sorrow of unknown children, was silently mourning.

‘This was Frantz’s house,’ my companion told me at last, ‘when he was small. He wanted a house all to himself, far from
everyone, where he could go and play, enjoy himself and live in when he felt like it. My father thought this such a funny and unusual whim that he did not refuse. And when he wanted to, on a Thursday or a Sunday, or whenever, Frantz would go off and live in his own house, like a grown-up. The children from the farms around came to play with him or help him with the housework or the gardening. What a wonderful game it was! And when evening came, he was not afraid to sleep here all alone. As for us, we admired him so much that we didn’t even think of worrying.

‘Now, for a long time, the house has been empty,’ she went on, sighing. ‘Monsieur de Galais, weighed down by age and grief, has never done anything to find Frantz or bring him back. What could he do, for that matter?

‘I come here quite often. The little peasants from hereabouts come and play in the courtyard as they would in the old days. I like to imagine that they are Frantz’s old friends, that he is still a child himself and that he will soon return with the fiancée he has chosen for himself.

‘The children know me well. I play with them. This brood of little chickens was ours…’

It had taken the shower and this small-scale disaster for her to confide in me all that great, unspoken sorrow and her regret at losing her brother – so crazy, so charming and so much admired. I heard her without saying anything, my heart full of tears…

When the doors and gate were shut, and the chicks put back in the wooden hutch behind the house, she sadly took my arm, and I led her home…

Weeks and months went by. Time past! Lost happiness! She had been the fairy, the princess and the mysterious love of all our adolescence, and it fell to me, my friend having left us, to take her arm and say the words that would assuage her grief. Those days, those conversations in the evening after the class that I took in the hillside school of Saint-Benoist-des-Champs, those walks when the only thing that we needed to discuss was the one thing about which we had both decided to say nothing – what
can I say now about all this? I remember nothing but the memory, already half erased, of a lovely face, grown thin, and of two eyes with lids slowly lowered as they looked at me, as if already wishing to see no world except the one inside.

I remained her faithful friend – her companion in an unspoken vigil – for a whole spring and summer, the like of which will never come again. We went back many times, in the afternoons, to Frantz’s house. She opened the doors to air it, so that there would be no mould when the young couple returned. She took care of the semi-wild poultry in the farmyard. And on Thursdays or Sundays, we joined in the games of the little country children from the farms around, their cries and laughter in that isolated place adding to the solitude and emptiness of the little abandoned house.

XI

CONVERSATION IN THE RAIN

August, holiday time, took me away from Les Sablonnières and Yvonne de Galais. I had to spend my two months’ holiday at Sainte-Agathe. I saw again the great dry yard, the shelter and the empty classroom… Meaulnes was everywhere, everything was filled with memories of our adolescence, now ended. In those long, yellowed days, I would shut myself up as I used to, before Meaulnes came, in the Archive Room or in the empty classrooms. I read, wrote and remembered… My father was away fishing, and Millie in the drawing room, sewing or playing the piano, as in the old days… And in the utter silence of the classroom where everything – the torn, green paper crowns,
¹⁶
the wrappings from prize books, the blackboards sponged clean – told you that the school year was over, the awards had been handed out, everything was turned towards autumn, the start of classes in October and renewed effort, the thought came to me that in the same way our youth was ended and happiness had passed us by, as I too was waiting for the start of term at Les Sablonnières and the return of Augustin… who perhaps might never return at all…

However, there was one piece of good news that I gave Millie when she began to question me about the new bride. I was not expecting her questions: she had a way that was at once very innocent and very sly of suddenly plunging you into confusion by putting a finger on your most secret thoughts. I called a halt to it all by announcing that my friend Meaulnes’ young wife would become a mother in October.

Inside myself, I recalled the day when Yvonne de Galais had intimated this great piece of news to me. There was a silence: a
young man’s slight embarrassment on my part. And then, to dispel it, I blurted out (thinking too late of all the tragic events that I was stirring up with this remark), ‘You must be very happy.’

But without any reservation, regret, remorse or bitterness, she gave a fine, contented smile and answered, ‘Yes, very happy.’

During that last week of the holidays, which is generally the finest and most romantic, a week of great rainstorms, a week when you start to light the fires and that I would usually spend hunting among the black damp fir trees of Le Vieux-Nançay, I got ready to return directly to Saint-Benoist-des-Champs. Firmin, my Aunt Julie and my cousins at Le Vieux-Nançay would have asked me too many questions that I did not want to answer. This time, I abandoned the idea of spending a week living the intoxicating life of a hunter and returned to my schoolhouse four days before the new term began.